LitHub / Chef Allen Susser on What It Means to Create Sustainable Cuisine

Allen Susser: Lionfish is delicious, but it’s also an invasive species, which means that it’s a danger to our environment here in Florida and throughout the Caribbean. One of the things that I have been a big proponent of and work with is getting people to understand what sustainable food is. To understand that we want fresh fish and fish available for eating for our generation, our kids, and their grandkids and their grandkids.

If we don’t pay attention to how we fish and what we do to our waters, and sustain the quality of the environment, we are going to be in trouble with our food supply, fish specifically. Not that we want to take fish as something nice to have; one-third of the world needs this volume of fish to survive. The need for a good, fresh protein is so important.

The lionfish is one example of how sustainable seafood is being threatened by the reefs they eat off of. … They eat all the fish along the reefs, and they multiply.

Mitchell Kaplan: How did it become so invasive?

Allen Susser: Lionfish live in the Indian Ocean and has its own enemies there. It got transported to Miami by someone’s fish tank, and it got dumped into the ocean. From that ocean exposure, it started to grow.

Full interview audio found here: https://lithub.com/chef-allen-susser-on-what-it-means-to-create-sustainable-cuisine/