More than a year after last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill,
a nagging question lingers: Is it safe to eat seafood from the
Gulf of Mexico? At the Monterey Bay Aquarium's annual Cooking
for Solutions Sustainable Foods Institute last week, marine
scientists, experts from environmental groups, and members of
the fishing community—who rarely agree on anything—answered that
question with a unanimous "yes." "There is still a lot of
science to be done, but it seems like we dodged a bullet. We got
lucky," said Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund
(EDF). Fitzgerald, who created EDF's SeafoodSafe program to
monitor chemical contamination in fish, has spent much of the
last year focusing on the Gulf. "I don't think we will see major
problems with contaminants in Gulf Seafood," he said. "But we're
not taking anything for granted. We're continuing to work with
the fishing industry to look for the possibility of
contamination from dispersants just to make sure." George
Crozier has been executive director of