{"id":39203,"date":"2022-06-27T00:01:02","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T07:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_news&p=39203"},"modified":"2022-06-27T11:32:38","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T18:32:38","slug":"130-year-old-menus-show-how-climate-change-is-already-affecting-what-we-eat","status":"publish","type":"custom_news","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/news\/130-year-old-menus-show-how-climate-change-is-already-affecting-what-we-eat\/","title":{"rendered":"130-Year-Old Menus Show How Climate Change Is Already Affecting What We Eat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vancouver, British Columbia, is nothing short of a seafood paradise. Situated at the mouth of the formerly salmon-rich<\/a> Fraser River, the city overlooks Vancouver Island to the west, and beyond that, the open Pacific Ocean. Long before it had a skyline or a deepwater port, this was a bountiful fishing ground for the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, who still depend on its waters for cultural and spiritual sustenance as much as for food. Today, tourists come from all over the world to taste local favorites like salmon and halibut fresh from the water. But beneath these waves, things are changing.<\/p>\n

Climate change is an intensifying reality for the marine species that live near Vancouver and for the people who depend on them. In a new study<\/a>, a team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) shows one unexpected way that climate effects are already manifesting in our daily lives. To find it, they looked not at thermometers or ice cores, but at restaurant menus.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a menu, you have a physical and digital record that you can compare over time,\u201d explains William Cheung, a fisheries biologist at UBC and one of the study\u2019s authors. Cheung has spent his career studying climate change and its effects on the world\u2019s oceans. He has contributed to several of the landmark reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but along with John-Paul Ng, an undergraduate student at UBC, he wanted to find a different way to both study and communicate those changes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people, especially in Vancouver, go out to restaurants and enjoy seafood, so we wanted to see whether climate change has affected the seafood that the restaurants serve,\u201d Cheung says.<\/p>\n

The team gathered menus from hundreds of restaurants around the city, as well as from restaurants farther afield in Anchorage, Alaska, and Los Angeles, California. Current menus were easy to find, but digging into the history of Vancouver\u2019s seafood proved a bit trickier. It took help from local museums, historical societies, and even city hall\u2014which the researchers were surprised to learn has records of restaurant menus going back over a century\u2014to compile their unusual data set. In all, they managed to source menus dating back to the 1880s.<\/p>\n

Using their records, the scientists created an index called the Mean Temperature of Restaurant Seafood (MTRS), which reflects the water temperature at which the species on the menu like to live. Predictably, they found that the MTRS of Los Angeles was higher than that of Anchorage, with Vancouver falling in the middle. But by analyzing how the MTRS for Vancouver has changed over time, they found a significant trend of warmer-water species becoming more common on restaurant menus. In the 1880s, the MTRS for Vancouver was roughly 10.7 \u00b0C. Now, it is 13.8 \u00b0C.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Researchers drew on modern and archival restaurant menus, such as this June 1888 menu from Vancouver, British Columbia’s Hotel Vancouver, to track how the species we eat have changed over time. Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives, AM1519-: PAM 1888-17<\/p><\/div>\n

One restaurant that became an important data point in the study was the historic Hotel Vancouver and its restaurant Notch8, a 10-minute walk from the harbor\u2019s edge in the city\u2019s financial district. The researchers were able to find examples of the hotel\u2019s menus from the 1950s, \u201960s, \u201980s, \u201990s, and today.<\/p>\n

David Baarschers is Hotel Vancouver\u2019s executive chef. Born and raised in Vancouver, he owes a lot of his passion for food to growing up surrounded by the rich variety of British Columbia seafood.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn high school, I had a friend whose dad had a fishing boat,\u201d says Baarschers. \u201cWhenever they came back from the salmon season, they always had a huge amount of prawn. We\u2019d be on their boat cooking them up in a pot of water. The first time I ever sucked the head of a prawn was just eye-opening. To learn that there was just so much you can do with food. It was mind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

While a chef does consider peoples\u2019 dietary preferences, a menu is also a reflection of what\u2019s swimming nearby. Baarschers says that when he and the restaurant staff are deciding what seafood to order, they have to strike a balance between availability and customer taste. \u201cWe usually have conversations with our suppliers,\u201d Baarschers explains. \u201cOkay, what\u2019s coming into season? What are you going to be able to supply us in the amount that allows us to put this on our menu?\u201d<\/p>\n

As warming intensifies, the species in high enough abundance to make it to menus are continuing to change. As Cheung and Ng\u2019s work predicts, local cool-water species like sockeye salmon will continue to decline on Vancouver menus. (In 2019, British Columbia saw its lowest salmon catch<\/a> in over 70 years.)<\/p>\n

In their place, southerly species are moving in. One of the most notable of these new arrivals isn\u2019t a fish, but Humboldt squid, which have begun appearing in both fishers\u2019 nets and in restaurants across the city.<\/p>\n

From a chef\u2019s perspective, Baarschers sees the changes as a mixed bag. New kinds of seafood are exciting to work with, but they come at the cost of beloved favorites.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get to know and love certain items, and when they decline and you no longer see the same fish around, it is a bit sad because you just have such fond memories,\u201d he says. The changes could also affect Vancouver\u2019s massive tourist industry, as customers have come to expect certain species on their plates. \u201cEveryone waits for halibut season to come,\u201d Baarschers says. \u201cAnd if you don\u2019t have halibut on the menu, people are asking why.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vancouver, British Columbia, is nothing short of a seafood paradise. Situated at the mouth of the formerly salmon-rich Fraser River, the city overlooks Vancouver Island to the west, and beyond that, the open Pacific Ocean. Long before it had a <\/p>\n

…<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":39205,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"By studying the so-called mean temperature of restaurant seafood, scientists have shown how the species that grace our plates have changed with time.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[36875]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"","podbean2":"","redirect":"","geolocation":null,"related":[31441,17062],"twitterimage":39206,"facebookimage":39204,"twitterdescription":"","edited":[15491],"factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_news"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39264,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39203\/revisions\/39264"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/15491"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17062"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}