detailed in new wild salmon recipe/conservation booklet: “Have Your Salmon & Eat it Too: California;” wine and wild salmon reception to follow.
SAN FRANCISCO – A diverse group of representatives from virtually every stop along the salmon supply chain will gather at Scoma’s restaurant along the wharf in San Francisco today at 2:30 p.m. to put forward cooperative solutions to the coastal salmon crisis. They will highlight concrete ways individual consumers and businesses can actively help in partnership to recover Pacific salmon and steelhead stocks in California, and throughout their native range.
Conservation group Trout Unlimited, through its WhyWild Campaign, has enlisted the power of consumers and businesses who appreciate the values – nutritional, ecological, culinary, economic and intrinsic – of wild salmon to leverage TU’s efforts to improve salmon habitat conditions and salmon management, thus allowing wild salmon and steelhead to thrive again throughout their native range. As a way to educate consumers about wild salmon and why it’s so critical to “vote with your fork,” today TU will be releasing “Have Your Salmon & Eat it Too: California,” which blends wild salmon conservation with salmon recipes and perspectives from an all-star lineup of Golden State culinary professionals. The report can be downloaded at www.whywild.org/haveyoursalmon_ca.
Trout Unlimited, Michel-Schlumberger and 15 other Sonoma County vineyards recently announced Water and Wine, a new initiative to meet the combined water needs of vineyards and salmon and steelhead in Northern California’s Wine Country. By creating small, off-stream ponds for storage of rainy-season water and switching irrigation away from the dry season--when salmon and steelhead need water the most--we’re working on solutions that provide irrigators the water reliability they need to produce great wine and provide fish the water they need to survive. Through unprecedented partnerships, TU and its partners in California work toward solutions for salmon everyday.
No segment of the salmon supply chain has been more economically impacted than the fleets of commercial boats that operate along the West Coast, and the communities they support. Headlines again this year have chronicled the closure of ocean salmon fishing for all of California and most of Oregon due to the collapse of the Sacramento chinook salmon run, and that is merely this year’s story. Zeke Grader is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the largest trade association of commercial fishermen on the West Coast, with members from San Diego to Alaska.
Central to the message of TU’s WhyWild Campaign is simply that the choices consumers make, be they at the grocery store, at their local restaurant, or at their meat market, do matter, and that collectively those choices have a pronounced ripple effect through the marketplace that does make a difference.
Thursday’s press conference will begin at 2:30 pm outside of Scoma’s restaurant along Pier 47 in San Francisco. The press conference will be followed immediately by a salmon and wine tasting inside Scoma’s, featuring Alaskan salmon from Taku River Reds and Scoma’s, along with wine from Water and Wine partners: Michel-Schlumberger Wine Estate, Mounts Vineyards and Winery, Robert Young Vineyards, and Steelhead Wines (click here for a full list of participants). The reception is free and open to the media, salmon conservation partners, and guests.