Smiling as Sustainability

BREAKFAST: 1/2 grapefruit, raisinbran. 
2nd BREAKFAST: bit o' carrot cake and mini-muffin. Acai juice. Hey it was church fellowship hour...
LUNCH: roasted beets, 2 carrots. A pear. rice cakes with peanut butter! 
DINNER: Tilapia (fish) with BBQ sauce, mixed veggies over white rice. 1/2 orange and dark chocolate 


ORIGIN OF ONE ITEM: TILAPIA

From the SeaFood Watch Recommendations, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium: 

Your "Best Choice" is tilapia grown in the U.S. in environmentally friendly systems. "Avoid" farmed tilapia from China and Taiwan, where pollution and weak management are widespread problems.

Sweet.

CONSUMER NOTE

Most tilapia consumed in the U.S. comes from China/Taiwan (frozen) or Central and South America (fresh). Less than 10% of tilapia consumed in the U.S. is farmed domestically.

So odds are mine is--gulp, was---part of the 90%....Shoot.


THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION


From Grist.org: "Peter Gerica is a third generation Gulf Coast fisherman.  When asked how his crab business survived both Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, he said, 'After Katrina, we lost everything. When I say everything, I mean when we got out of the trees all we had on were our pants and a smile. You just have to keep moving forward.'His definition of sustainability? 'It can be defined as any species, (including Gulf Coast fishermen and Louisiana blue crabs) that withstands the impact of all user groups upon it, maintaining equilibrium throughout its lifecycle.”"


I wish I were more intrigued by his words on sustainability. But what captivates me is the image of his smiling face climbing down from a tree. How often do we need a smile during a long day, a long week? I saw the devastation of Katrina only 5 months after it struck the Gulf. And the last thing I could have done was smile. There were entire cars in trees. Steps leading to empty foundations. Dogs searching for bodies. I was a college freshman then and knew next to nothing about cooking food, let alone all this sustainability stuff. But it was New Orleans that gave me my first lesson. It taught me about offshore oil drilling and wetland loss. About wetlands' role as a hurricane buffer-zone. 

I had hoped that I finally had picked a nice and sustainable food to research. Thwarted! (see consumer note above) Can we ever get it right? 

Our setbacks are real: the devastation of climate change, the difficulty of living sustainably, the hunger to maintain our appetite to do good things. So today my definition of sustainability is, like Peter, to smile. Next time I buy/eat fish, I will try to remember that when it feels pointless, I can smile. And that too is acting sustainably. I'll also get catfish!  

 Erika