There aren't plenty of fish in the sea

MONTEREY, Calif. -- Boston chef Chris Douglass is ignoring a hammerhead shark, paying no attention to a gigantic sea turtle, and barely glancing at a school of barracuda, all of which are swimming in an aquarium tank that holds one million gallons of crystal-clear seawater. Douglass, 51, co-owner of Icarus in the South End and Ashmont Grill in Dorchester, is instead pondering the culinary potential of half-a-dozen streamlined and silvery fish, 5 or 6 feet long, darting around the huge tank like they own the place. "Now that's some serious seafood," says Douglass. "Bluefin tuna. Amazing fish."

The bluefins are a star attraction of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, on California's central coast, 120 miles south of San Francisco. They swim in the aquarium's Outer Bay Exhibit, a spectacular setting for a regal fish.

Each spring for the last few years, the Aquarium has hosted Cooking for Solutions, inviting a couple of hundred people -- chefs, marine scientists, journalists, and seafood industry folks -- to talk for several days about stewardship of the world's fish stocks. The aquarium honors a small group of chefs who demonstrate a grasp of the hot topic of sustainability, defined by one Norwegian official as "meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

This year, the aquarium picked Douglass to be a "celebrity chef ambassador" along with six others, including Keith Froggett of Scaramouche Restaurant in Toronto and Elena Hernandez of Panama's Academia de Artes Culinarias.

Douglass, who has studied the sustainability of fish, knows that the bluefin tuna he's looking at are threatened by overfishing. His remark about "serious seafood," he says, is actually a joke, though he's quick to note that the depletion of the world's seafood supply is no laughing matter.

Bluefins, writes Richard Ellis in "The Empty Ocean," are "the most beautiful fish in the world." They're top predators possessed of well-muscled flesh. That flesh is coveted in sushi markets. Bluefins, writes Ellis, are "literally being eaten out of existence."

In the 1970s, during his formative years as a chef, Douglass was influenced by a ferment in American cooking. Young chefs put new emphasis on local, fresh ingredients, close knowledge of supply sources, and a sense of deep responsibility toward food and toward guests. "We had this idea," Douglass says, "that food, properly prepared, can have soul."

In the late 1990s, Douglass connected to the burgeoning sustainable seafood movement, which came forth in the wake of several studies suggesting that the world's oceans are not, in fact, an inexhaustible resource. Today, when Douglass sits down with his staff to plan menus, sustainability is on the front burner.

Which doesn't make his life any easier. "Thinking about sustainability is fairly complicated, actually," Douglass says. "We need to keep in mind what our guests want. We need to assess the quality of information that we're getting about threatened seafood stocks." One consideration is this: Is the information he's receiving reliable?

There are many complexities. Atlantic halibut are in trouble, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program (mbayaq.org), while Pacific halibut are doing OK. So, last Friday night at the aquarium, Douglass and his team seared pieces of Pacific halibut in a porcini crust and served them to 1,500 guests who had paid $75 apiece to sample sustainable and organic fare from dozens of restaurateurs and wine growers.

In the noisy crowd, Dennis Kelso tastes the halibut. "I like it," he says. Kelso is a fisheries expert at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, Calif. "Pacific halibut has huge potential. It's delicious, and it's got an excellent conservation management system."

"Excellent conservation management system" are the buzz words that many in the industry use to describe fish that are not at risk. It has become the bottom line for thoughtful seafood lovers. As with all conservation issues, not everyone agrees.

Last November, the journal Science published the results of a four-year study by an international group of ocean researchers based at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, saying that 90 percent of the edible fish and shellfish species now hauled from the ocean globally may be extinct in about 40 years due to overfishing and other factors. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the US Dept. of Commerce, called the report too pessimistic, and the National Fisheries Institute, a trade association for the US seafood industry, also took issue with the findings (aboutseafood.com).

In Monterey last Friday, after seminars on the state of the seafood industry were over, aquarium guests partied late into the night. Many stopped by the Outer Bay Exhibit. A man wearing a dark sport coat, and a woman in a little black dress, both carrying wine glasses, peered into the big tank for several minutes. "Two hundred cans of tuna," the man announces. "We need some decent mayo."

Bob Frost, a freelance writer in San Francisco, is writing a book on the history of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.