Lure: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the West Coast by Ned Bell with Valerie Howes. Figure 1 Publishing, Hardcover, 240 pages, $38.95.
Ned Bell’s knowledge of seafood runs deep. That’s obvious on every page of his new cookbook, Lure: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the West Coast, which takes an encyclopedic look at everything connected with Pacific Ocean fisheries.
It’s just over a year since Bell was named executive chef of Ocean Wise but he’s been involved with fish and food in some form or another for most of his life.
Born on the lake in Penticton and raised in Victoria and Vancouver, he’s always been close to the water.
Bell began working as a dishwasher at Avenue Grill in Kerrisdale at the age of 14 and right out of high school entered Dubrulle French Culinary School to get a start on a career that is now into its third decade.
“I’ve been very fortunate from the beginning,” says Bell. “I’ve had great mentors and just love it and that love for this business is crucial because it’s not always the easiest business.”
Fresh out of cooking school he got an apprenticeship at Le Crocodile under chef Michel Jacob. Rob Feenie was also there as a sous chef and when Feenie left to open Lumiere in 1995 he brought Bell along with him.
“It was fast and furious,” Bell remembers. “Rob was the first new-breed Canadian chef who became recognized outside of Canada. He is an incredibly talented cook first and foremost. It was right place, right time. The Food Network didn’t even exist back then.”
Bell moved back and forth across Canada during his first decade as a chef further expanding his culinary skills. In 2008, he was named one of Western Living magazine’s “Top 40 Foodies Under 40” while he was based in Kelowna at the Cabana Bar and Grille.
In 2011, he took over the Four Seasons and YEW kitchens in Vancouver and made a definitive culinary statement by launching a new sustainable seafood concept.
“As a chef I started to realize back in ’97 we were cooking the heck out of unsustainable seafood because we just didn’t know better,” says Bell. “We didn’t even know that it was unsustainable. We were just cooking Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, anything we could get our hands on for that matter.”
The sustainable seafood movement is only two decades old with the pioneering efforts of organizations such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch and the Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise helping to raise awareness of the problems affecting the world’s oceans and fisheries.
“This is a newish conversation when it comes to the words sustainable seafood or healthy lakes, oceans and rivers,” says Bell. “We are curious about our foods and I liken it to the organics movement of 20 years ago. Organics used to be the dark lit corner of the grocery store and now it dominates the grocery store. My hope is that sustainable seafood will be the only conversation we are having in less than a decade.”
As executive chef at Ocean Wise, Bell has been given the opportunity to push the conversation further and Lure is his manifesto.
“Climate change and overfishing are the biggest threats to our world’s oceans,” he says. “We need to pay more attention to our impact. There will be more plastics in the ocean by 2050 than fish. Why don’t we start paying attention to single-use plastics? The ocean is the most important resource we have on earth for humans. Full stop. Without it, we can’t grow anything that we consume.”
Bell could have put together a cookbook a long time ago but preferred to wait for the right moment. “I really wanted to do a book that had some teeth to it,” he says.
He’s written the book with Valerie Howes and partnered with some of his favourite “Ocean Guardians” (Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, Seachoice, Ocean Wise and the Marine Stewardship Council) to take sustainable seafood advocacy to the next level.
“Two billion people rely on the ocean for their daily source of protein,” he says. “If you live away from a coast you probably don’t think that much about oceans. I call (my approach) the arms of the octopus. I want to be the body of the octopus that hopefully is able to influence many different conversations around ocean’s health, species’ health, ecosystem health and, at the end of the day, human health.
“I want us to eat more seafood and I want to feed down the food chain. In North America we only eat four species of fish: tuna, salmon, some sort of white fish and shrimp, by far, is the most consumed seafood. Shrimp because it’s the cheapest by a longshot. We’re addicted to cheap. I understand that. Life is expensive.”
Bell would like to see more plant-based, nutrient-dense ingredients in meals garnished with sustainable seafood.
The chef has a challenge in his cookbook he calls the ‘52 and 12.’ “I want people to eat sustainable seafood once a week for the next year and then once a month I want them to try something from the ocean they haven’t had before, whether that’s geoduck or sea urchin or seaweed. There’s 10,000 edible plants in the ocean which we could and should be eating.
“The ocean is this incredible resource we know very little about. We know more about the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean. It’s something we need to explore and I think we can begin by asking: ‘Is this seafood sustainable?’ The book is hopefully going to get people to cook more seafood at home. It’s not a book by a chef for chefs. It’s a book written for Canadians to cook more fish at home. There’s some ballsy recipes in there that some people won’t try and then there’s a lot of recipes people could have as part of their regular repertoire.”
Lure focuses on Pacific Ocean species from California to Alaska through a Canadian perspective. Further books may tackle Atlantic, Arctic and freshwater fisheries.
Bell is hosting a number of launch events for Lure including a sold-out evening at Lonsdale’s Cook Culture on Nov. 20 featuring a four-course tasting menu.
