My review on Eva's Wild Sockeye Salmon
I got my first slabs of Bristol Bay sockeye from Eva’s Wild yesterday. This company, started by filmmaker, ichthyophile, raconteur, and dear friend Mark Titus, works with small-time commercial fishing boats in Bristol Bay to put this miraculous food onto subscriber’s dinner plates. It’s a kind of Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model for sustainable seafood, with an added wrinkle. Subscribers are strongly encouraged to save the places that produce the food they love to eat.
The Bristol Bay sockeye run has to be among the healthiest runs of salmon anywhere in the world. Last year, an eye-popping 79 million sockeye returned to Bristol Bay. The continued flourishing of this run of fish is a testament to the power of good habitat, an absence of dams and mines, and the good will of people who’ve been working overtime to defend it.
“We still have the power to save the wild places we love. You are what you eat, my friends.”
Bristol Bay sockeye were threatened for years by the proposed Pebble Mine, which would have put a copper mining operation in the heart of the freshwater womb that births these beautiful fish.
Along with the delicious salmon, I got a ball cap from Eva’s Wild. It’s embroidered with an image of crimson-colored sockeye making their way upriver. Framing the scene is the GPS coordinates of the site of what would have been the copper mine.
An astounding 79 million sockeye salmon, sometimes referred to as “red gold”, returned to Bristol Bay last year.
So now every time I take a bite of the tender, sunset sky colored flesh of a Bristol Bay sockeye, my eyes water a bit right after my mouth does.
We still have the power to save the wild places we love. You are what you eat, my friends.
If you enjoy what you read on my blog, and you want to support my mission to remove dams throughout the US, please purchase my latest book, Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot Chaotic World.
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