A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

You can literally have a camera rolling as that net and fork system is coming at you and ahead of you is life, and just like a Lord of the Rings scene, where everything turns from lush and green to black and on fire, that is literally what is left behind. Grew up on the water, pulling mussels out of jetties, raking for clams, throwing chicken legs out on string into the Georgia pond to collect blue crabs. I mean, we did it. Andrew Zimmern, James Beard, award winning chef, this is my 50th anniversary in the restaurant business. Chefs are the greatest activists and the best storytellers. We have the solutions. That’s why, with hope in the water, season one, we let these incredible problem solvers just tell us their solutions. It’s a very powerful series, and it gives me a lot of hope for the future, which is why we called it hope in the water.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a tremendous guest on the program, Andrew Zimmern. James Beard, award winning chef, writer, teacher, Emmy, award winning TV personality. He’s on the Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. He’s the author of five books, the newest being the blue food cookbook, which we’re going to talk to him extensively about today. He’s also has a production company, intuitive content. And one of the great things that Andrew has done is a PBS show, hope in the water with David Kelly, kind of a hero of lawyer shows Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. So I’m curious about how that went. Sounds like a fun experience. So Andrew, without further ado, and I’m not going to go through the rest of your resume, because that might take up 30 or 40 minutes, so we’ll just jump right in. Thanks for being on the show. No Thanks for having me. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about since I mentioned it. Let’s go the hope in the water. And what was it like working with David Kelly?

Well, hope in the water was phenomenal experience. We shot it on five continents. It’s a three part Docu series, Emmy nominated. People can watch it@pbs.com it is, although they fairly consistently every couple of months, rebroadcast it on PBS stations across the country, but it is available on demand. Shameless plug. Go watch it. Not shameless plug for dollars. It’s PBS. After all, it’s shameless plug for trying to make the world a better place one meal at a time. The idea really came about from a bunch of work that I had been doing for about 15 years that began with a relationship with a woman named Jennifer Bushman, who started a nonprofit called fed by blue. She got me involved in a couple panel discussions about food down at South by Southwest.

And this is going back 12 years or so, and there was a trout farmer on our panel, and, you know, Dave the trout farmer. And I was like, Hey, how are you, you know, and he was, you know, very regularly dressed. He had no posse, no handlers, no nothing. He just showed up in the room where we had our you know, you meet 15 minutes earlier with the other speakers on the panel, and we do these panels together. And you know, after the first one, you know, he had said some very, very bright guy, and he said some really impressive things. And you know, there are quite a few folks wanted to talk to talk to him afterwards, talk to him about trout. And there are a bunch of people who wanted to talk to me about whatever it was that I was speaking about on that particular panel. And he just fascinating guy. I liked him very much. Year Two went by, and, you know, same thing happened. You know, hey, Dave trout farmer, third year that we were at South by Southwest, that our topic had become so popular in the cultural zeitgeist, the solutions, the tech solutions, especially in the linkage of technology to improving food systems globally, that, in turn, would positively affect our ever worsening climate crisis.

Got a bigger room, and when you’re in a bigger room, a lot more people fill those seats, because even people who don’t you know, they just want to see who’s in the big room. So I remember we’re in the big room, we finish our panel, and there’s like hundreds of people want to talk to the trout farmer, and including a lot of press. And I’m like, you know, he’s fascinating guy in his his facile under. Understanding of these big issues and why he started this trout farm is just really, really fantastic. But, I mean, it was like people screaming, you know, David, David, and I’m, you know, afterwards, we’re walking back to the green room, where we had our coats and our briefcases and stuff like that. And, you know, I said to him, you know, I said, I said, Dave, you know, you seem really popular for a trout as we’re saying this, as I’m saying this, Ken Burns and a couple of other very famous, well known documentarians are coming down this back hallway because they’re the next group talking about documentary filmmaking in the same room that we’ve just exited. And they’re all like, David, and he’s all like, man, he knows these people. I’m like, okay, something’s up, because Ken Burns does not just like, know this trout farmer from Idaho.

And I said to him, I was like, David, something tells me that you have a day job that I don’t know about. And he laughed, and he said, Yeah, I don’t really like talk about that much when I’m talking about these issues. But then he told me what he did with his day job, and I said, Well, you know, I own a production company. I’m in television, so the fact that you didn’t tell me this for two years is killing me. You know, by this point, I’m his, you know, we’re friends, right? I said I’ve watched everything you’ve ever made, and by the way, you’ve referenced his two of his earliest shows. I think he’s got, like, 27 Emmys, something ridiculous. I mean, you have to remember, he writes, produces, directs, you know, he’s married to Michelle Pfeiffer. He has, I mean, the amount of of, I mean, he’s very prodigious. He makes two, three series a year, limited series he had never done unscripted before. So when we were pitching hope in the water, he and I would be on, you know, before it went to PBS, we were pitching, you know, Hulu and HBO and Amazon.

All these people know him. They’re thrilled, by the way, as someone, I own a production company, so I’m pitching those companies all the time. And you get the, you know, assistants, the assistant regional manager, you know, David E Kelly is pitching like everyone in the C suite is on the meeting with you, and he had a great shtick, because David would was always saying, Well, I defer to Andrew. He goes, I’ve never produced unscripted television before, which I just thought was everything you need to know about how wonderful David E Kelly is, as a human being, how gracious and kind that he would allow a small potatoes guy like me to sort of roll out the concept when, obviously, he’s David E Kelly, the he is a guy who got into TV to pay his bills so that He could fish more. He is a lifelong outdoorsman, and his favorite act, he would rather be fishing than doing anything else, full stop, one of these, just one of the we all know them.

He’s just one of those guys. He’d rather be fishing, and he is extremely civically motivated and a good Global Citizen of the highest order. And so when he and his family had the opportunity just to put their money with their where their mouth is, he decided to start a trout farm, and it’s now the largest aquaculture operation, I believe, in North America River and trout, the product is superb, and I’m his biggest fan. Now, from a storytelling standpoint, nobody knows how to tell a story better than David E Kelly, and at one point we had sent the first rough cut of the first episode of season one of hope in the water to him. And we would have these monthly meetings, bi weekly, you know, is as needed, depending on different parts of the process. And you know, part of these, the lengthier meetings, was when he would give us notes on what he saw. And I paid attention like it was nobody’s business, because he’s just, I could learn a lot. And he gave a lecture to us, what started as a lecture.

He gave a note that said, By the way, that that whole thing, when the storm is coming, you see all that water and the stars green is cut that and then he was starting to move on. And we love that, like, little second snippet, and we’re like, you know? And we’re good at what we do, and we won a lot of awards. We’re no David E Kelly, but we we really felt it was a win. We’re like, Are you sure? You know? Because that was great. And it sets up that next moment where the storm’s worse and it’s blowing way. Waves and wind and water is coming into our protagonist face. They’re trying to get the boat back to shore before they all die. They’re caught in a tropical storm out on the water, deep sea fishing.

And David just went off for like 10 minutes, but in a good way, he said, let me explain something to you about velocity and storytelling any single frame, not a frame that doesn’t propel the story ever goes into anything I do. And he started to explain why the velocity of the story has to be there in every single frame. And it was a mat, I mean, literally, was a master class. And so I think in every way possible, collaborating with him on the series has been a dream come true.

That sounds amazing. What a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it with us, because it’s like connecting a lot of dots that all of us have enjoyed a lot of his shows, and now to hear kind of some backstory about his character and what he brings to the table professionally as well. As you know, his philanthropic endeavors is a tremendous thing. So, and I understand you’re working on a second season fed by blue is how close are you to launching that one?

Fed by Blue is one of our collaborators on the hope in the water series, and I am very optimistic about season two. We’ll see what happens.

Okay, well, it’s exciting, so tell us a little bit. We’ll kind of march back to the origin story and how you got into being environmentally active, and what’s your, what was your path to that?

Grew up on the water with parents who made me aware I also grew up at the right time. I was born in 1961 so the fact of the matter is, is that I lived through the marches and the politicalization of climate health and wellness issues, and my mother wrote books about seashells. My father was a voracious eater and traveler, but he loved I mean, we didn’t call it foraging, but all summer long, anything we could collect, we ate from rose hip tea from rose hips we found in the dunes behind our summer house to surf casting for our dinner, pulling mussels out of jetties, raking for clams, throwing chicken legs out on string into the Georgia pond to collect blue crabs.

I mean, we did it, and it was, it was how I grew up, and there were always stories. My parents were great storytellers, and made me keenly aware of what was happening in the world and why they were telling me that we dig our own clams, and why my mother would make me watch the these boats set out from the beach to set nets in the morning and haul in the nets they they had set the night before, because it was a disappearing piece of our history, and as people kept buying up land on the beach in the on the South Fork of Long Island where We spent our summers, the there was no no more place for fishermen to keep their boats, and these beaches became the the stomping grounds of the rich and famous, and not of the Long Island working fishermen. And that transition took place over about a three year period in the late 60s into the early 70s, and it’s never gone back.

And I’m not advocating for a return to the days of the horse and buggy, and I’m not really advocating for the days of men pulling 40 foot long boats with oars and piles of nets out of the dunes and setting out to sea twice a day. There’s a different way of taking a boat out to do the exact same thing that’s that’s safer and makes more sense for everyone, but I am advocating for preserving an endangered species, and those are our fishing communities around the world, artisanal fishing communities, especially artisanal fishing communities, understand the solutions to our climate crisis. They understand how to protect and produce out of our oceans at the same time, they know how to feed their communities, most of which are very hurting for food. They are economic develop, their micro economic development plans, and so their preservation is of vital importance to global culture, national culture, and if you live on the coast in America, your community’s culture.

So I’ve always cared a lot about these issues. I also. Also made a decision when I was about six years old, that I wanted to become a chef, and I became a chef, and I’m still a chef, and I’ve taken a paycheck from the restaurant community for 50 years. This is my 50th anniversary in the restaurant business, and I will tell you chefs are the greatest activists and the best storytellers and the most civically aware group of people that I know of beyond anyone’s measure. And the reason for that is a rather simple one. As a chef, when you stand metaphorically in the middle of your kitchen, you are surrounded by every hot button issue of our time. When I stand in the middle of a kitchen in a restaurant that I have a part of, or Restaurant Group I’m a part of, or if I’m cooking at an event in somebody else’s kitchen, all around me, we are confronted moment by moment, especially if you’re an owner operator as a chef, which I have been at many times In my life, and still am today.

You’re surrounded by immigration issues, job equity issues, pay equity issues, gender equity issues, healthcare issues, hunger, climate crisis, food waste, national security, international security. I could go on and on. You’re confronted by those issues every day. They come in the form of many, many, many different problems that you were expected to solve, but you were exposed to them every day. So you know that is why we as chefs hold a very special place in our communities, why restaurants that are independently operated are so vital to our cultural communities, and why I firmly believe so many and it was the reason I decided I wanted to make hope in the water. We have the solutions. We have to tell the stories of them so everyone else knows we have the solutions to our problems, and then we need to scale them. We don’t need more ideas. We have the solutions. We don’t need ideas.

Matt 17:07
Well, I agree with you, and I kind of feel that great restaurants are are like museums. They’re cultural institutions that have so much value to a community and add so much and and I know the great restaurants that are sourcing their foods from local farmers, that are sourcing it from organic and really taking care to make sure that we’re getting good seafood that’s not polluted and so on and so forth. And I guess that segue us into your book and trying to make the good choices so that we can take care of the the oceans and the rivers and the streams, so we don’t over fish them. Obviously, there’s a lot of overfishing being done. There are Chinese boats out there with 100 mile trawling nets, scraping, you know, through the ocean. And, you know, taking lots of things out of the ocean that they shouldn’t be taking, and I think your point is to preserving artisanal fishing communities is a great one. And I haven’t actually heard other people talking about that, not that I’ve talked to everybody, but I’ve had a few 100 episodes on the show and, and I think that’s a tremendous focal point for every community to take care of their fishermen and and make sure that that’s a priority in in an artisanal way. So good.

Speaker 1 18:37
I’ll pull one thread on that, since you brought it up. And it’s very, very important to me. It’s a very, very important piece of the solution, because you highlighted the problem, which is, you know, 100 mile nets. And then on the flip side of that, these giant underwater forks, for want of a better example, with a giant 100 mile net behind them that literally breaks up everything on the sea floor and leaves in its wake dead things. And when there’s no plant life or coral life on the sea floor, there’s the fish disappear. So you can literally have a camera rolling as that net and fork system is coming at you, and ahead of you is life. And just like a lord, you know, Lord of the Rings, you know scene where everything turns from lush and green to black and on fire, that is literally what is left behind. The oceans, however, are very resilient, and we’ve seen by monitoring no take zones over the last 3040, years that the ocean and by the way, for those that are casual listeners, we all remember April of 2020, when all of a sudden no boats had been on the Venice Canals for 2030, days, and they were Chris. Clear. All the sediment went to the bottom, and people saw fish and plant life was growing.

And people were like, oh my god, we haven’t observed those species here. We thought they were gone forever, you know. But what had happened was is we stopped abusing the water. We literally created a no take zone in the Venice Lagoon, right? And there were, you know, Bronzino, Italian sea bass swimming down the canals. I mean, the ocean’s very resilient that when you eliminate these giant, large boats, you’re left with the question, how do you feed this Hungry Planet? The answer is, artisanal fishing communities.

Why do we allow it with Co Op dairies, but not with artisanal fishermen in terms of banks, everything from the World Bank to Bank of America here in our country, helping fishermen develop a cooperative system so that 1020, 30 families, groups of artisanal fishermen put together, can be a massive economic machine that’s worthy of investment. It is a crucial piece of how we feed people, while at the same time produce out of the ocean, while at the same time, get rid of the bad actors and invest in the people that have the right solution, right these are small boats that go out on a, you know, 10 horsepower engine, a mile and a half out to sea, and run a little net around and pull in a couple 100 pounds of small reef fish that, by the way, are delicious to eat. Grow to size really fast.

We tend to only eat the same five species of seafood. In this country, there’s 1000s of edible species of fish in the ocean. We should be focusing on different foods. We should be using the solutions that have been offered to us by the people who work on the water. First and foremost, I think that’s of utmost important. And I think artisanal fishermen and artisanal fishing communities around the world have so much to teach us. That’s why, with hope in the water, season one, we let these incredible problem solvers just tell us there’s solutions, and we just documented it. And it’s a very powerful series in that way, and it gives me a lot of hope for the future, which is why we called it hope in the water.

Well, I look going back to your book, and one of the things that you talk about in the book questioning whether wild or sustainably rate farm raised fish are better and which which one is. And I think you kind of come down that both can be good. One of the things that you talk about are the different certifications, Monterey Berry, aquarium, Seafood Watch and the Marine Stewardship Council and ocean wise, sure, there’s lots of aquacultures, Stewardship Council, the best aquatic practices. And even our government has Noah fishwatch.gov, for environment, environmentally friendly options. You know, I guess my thought was, I always felt like wild was better than than farm raised but you seem to be okay with the farm raised stuff.

I’m more than okay with it. I think we need to invest large amounts of dollars into aquaculture systems around the world, because aquaculture works. I am very much pro wild. The problem is it’s very difficult to maintain a well managed, sustainable wild fishery. The fish move. It’s that simple, and we have so badly harmed our our planet, that the fish now move in ways that are much less predictable than they were 100 years ago. We kind of know where they are. It’s just that we know so little about our ocean. You know? We know. We have mapped every square millimeter of planet Earth, above the water and below. We’ve what. We know what, what’s going on in about 10% of it. So three years ago, when they literally suspended the snow crab season.

They said, Where have 500 billion snow crabs gone? They just disappeared. It’s just impossible to get down into these nooks and crannies far miles below the ocean surface at ridiculously low temperatures and pressures to find where these animals are, but we had always assumed they had gone into specific areas and canyons and the ocean floor where there was food and colder water. And it turned out when we found them again right, almost by complete luck. It turned out by. Examining their bodies, they were they had been living at colder temperatures. I guess they could tell by fat deposits and other I’m not a crustacean scientist, although I do try to play them on TV, and we could tell by their diet, what they had been eating. And so the answer was, yeah, they went to colder water where there’s more food, right? Makes all the sense in the world. But I digress.

It’s always kind of counterintuitive to me that colder water is like the jungle for sea life, whereas warmer water is like the desert for them. So it’s That’s right, which is Bay void is very counterintuitive for us. It’s like, oh, it’s lush in the warm areas, and it’s desolate in the super cold areas.

That’s right. So you know, nobody ever walked into a supermarket and asked someone wearing a red vest restocking a shelf. Excuse me, can you point me to the section with the wild chickens and cows? Said, no one ever we have created those animals, and now we’ve created a horrible system for raising them to scale. I don’t believe these giant factory farms and CAFO farms benefit anyone. They don’t benefit the consumer. They just benefit a handful of really big corporations that are destroying our planet. I mean, just the runoff alone, the chemicals in the food.

I mean, I go on and on about land based animal agriculture, don’t let me stop you. Well, why is it okay? Why is it okay to raise chickens, pigs and cows the natural way, letting them freely roam, giving them sunshine and fresh grass and feed that’s healthy when appropriate, and not treating them with antibiotics and creating a a a classification of what we now refer to, generically speaking, as free ranging animals that are healthier ones raised under organic conditions, right, that are much better for you than the cheap commodity chickens that are raised in cages and pump full of chemicals, right?

We all know this to be the case, and we all know what we should be eating and shouldn’t be eating. It’s obvious. It’s so confusing when it comes to fish and seafood, because we have a wild stock that, at times, is available to us. However, a poorly managed wild fishery is just as bad as a poorly managed aquaculture fishery, right? So in the book, my co author, Barton Seaver, and I make a point that the most important question isn’t, is it wild or farmed? It’s, is it fresh and is it raised sustainably?

Yeah, well, those are the questions that As consumers, we need to be more cognizant of, as Cesar Chavez said, every dollar we spend is a vote. So we we need to be voting with our dollars to be demanding to get really sustainably raised farm stuff and or sustainably raised or sustainably caught wild fish.

Well, by the way, I meant to say thank you for being so honest and saying, you know, Hey, isn’t wild better? Because most people automatically assume wild is better, right? And the reason is not so much that we know for sure wild is better. It’s just that, over the course of 5060, years of aquaculture history terminating in about 2010 so those you know, let’s just say the 40 years from 1970 to 2010 we heard disaster story after disaster story about the evils of aquaculture. And most of those stories were right. There were a lot of really good, well intentioned people who were just using the technology at the time that we later found out was not serving us well. We had too many fish per square meter in ocean, born and land based aquaculture. We were using copper netting in the oceans.

Not good. We were feeding fish in an unsustainable way, eight pounds of food over the course of a fish’s lifetime to produce one usable pound of seafood for human consumption. That’s backwards, right? We were polluting the ocean with feed that was falling through the the nets where and then the fish couldn’t get them. They would damage each other because they were so crowded, story after story after story, those things are now almost non existent because. People who were going to the expense of creating farmed fish systems would like to be in business for a long time. And we now know that your yields are greater when you have fewer fish per cubic meter. We now know that copper netting doesn’t work, that that it’s a pollutant. It’s a soft metal. In fact, they’re banned. We now know how to feed the fish so the the feed doesn’t fall through the nets. You know, when we’re babies, we give babies a bottle every two or three hours. It’s actually how human beings should eat. Guess what? It’s how seafood in an aquaculture system should eat as well.

Because if you just dump a whole bunch of food in the fish frenzy and ball up, and then a lot of the food just falls through the net, if you just throw a couple of pellets out, or better, yet, have a machine that does it and measures it, and you have video equipment that can show you the rate at which you should do it, where it should be spread, which fish are eating over the course of time, the fish that aren’t hungry anymore go to another part of the pen, and the fish that haven’t eaten as much head towards where they know the food is. We have eliminated so many of these problems. We now have fish feed that is almost a zero to one model, because we’re using natural food scraps that would have otherwise gone into the dumpster, and we’re able to raise healthy fish on real food and do so in a very sustainable manner. Aquaculture works when it’s done properly.

It works. What infuriates me is when I read about billions of dollars of investment for cell based seafood research, why are we if we just put a 10th of that money, 1/10 towards increasing the amount of aquaculture farms on planet Earth, we would be able to feed half of our hungry population globally. The numbers are staggering, absolutely staggering.

You know, it’d be great if we invested some of this AI money into something like this, because it has…

That’s exactly right. It’s fascinating that you say that, because it’s, it’s, you know, when I when I talk to you know, serious economists, I’m like, Isn’t it better off to invest in something that works at its infancy, rather than take the risk on something that may not work at its infancy? And they said, Yes, but what you’re forgetting is the people who are investing in AI and people who are investing in cell based foods are not people like you and I, right? You know, do I have money in the stock market? Yes, but I’m not a part of these really big funds, right? Because I don’t have enough money in those funds. These funds that are putting billions of dollars in those places are made up of people with billions of dollars.

So Brian, I don’t know a lot about you, but I’m just going to assume you’re not a member of the billionaire class for purposes of this conversation, and those are the people that are putting so much money into this. And I’ve, I’ve said that conferences, please devote your dollars to solutions that work. You know, cell based seafood won’t scale for another 20 years if it does ever and even then, it’s going to be so expensive it’s not gonna be able to feed the hungry people.

Yes, that’s crazy. Well, I guess it’s somewhat greed in terms of wanting to hit the big home run versus just get getting the single here, just to get a single here, you got it. Let’s do that. But yeah, I was fascinated by, you know, you’d written publicly about your homelessness and addiction and early 90s and coming back from that. And kudos to you on that front. And I also share in that journey, not homelessness, but addiction and recovery in the 12 Steps. So glad to hear that you’re on that journey.

It is a it’s the greatest joy of my life. Yeah, I can relate. It’s just a different form of sustainability. I mean, you know, addiction and alcoholism is an unsustainable practice. It only gets worse. It’s you wind up in, you know, jails and institutions or dead. That’s the only place that substance use disorders take a human being. And so if you have a substance use disorder, I always tell people, ask for help. It is the thing that as human beings, we we were not really good at doing and when I finally asked for help, it saved my life.

Yes, that’s a great story and an inspiration to many. So yeah, everybody out in the audience, if you need help, ask for it. There’s plenty of help out there. So yeah. Drew a, you know, just maybe going back to the your new book and tell us a little bit about things that are in the book that you would like to, you know, have spread to the masses. You know, the book is just a labor of love. It’s 134 fantastic, 145 fantastic recipes, so it’s just like any other cookbook, except it also has 150 pages of wisdom of the kind that I believe, debunks myths about seafood, but more importantly, empowers the reader with the information they need so they can buy seafood with confidence, and the recipes allow you to cook seafood simply and deliciously with confidence, we have wonderful photography by Eric Wolfinger and illustrations by Yulia Shevchenko. It is a gorgeous and beautiful book. It’s available everywhere books are sold.

You can buy it online. You can go to my website, Andrew zimmern.com where there’s by the way, everyone who hears this should go visit Andrew zimmer.com you can sign up for my YouTube that’s free. Get links to, you know, books of mine, like hope in the water, and, you know, you can even sign up for my sub stack. So all all things are found at Andrew zimmern.com but the book, I think, is absolutely fabulous. You know, every 10 years, a seafood cookbook comes around that is an important one, and our publisher believes that this decade, that book is ours, and it’s the highest praise that I’ve I’ve heard so far, and I can’t wait to hear from from folks who use the book what they think.

Well, I love it from two respects, I am a big seafood lover, almost purely pescatarian and and I love it from an environmental standpoint, and that you’re getting the word out as to how, how to buy and prepare seafood in a way that is sustainable and ethical and environmentally, you know, connected. So kudos to you for doing that very important work, because it’s a simple stuff, like asking where the seafood comes from, and being a good consumer.

1,000%. you hit the nail on the head. I mean, that is, you know, it’s funny, because you were talking about my, my recovery journey, you know, I asked for help, and magical things happen. I see people staring at the seafood counter, and then they let the fellow or the lady behind it talk them into something without asking any questions. I always like to lean over, I said, you you can ask them where that fish is from. You tell them what sort of recipe you had in mind, and they’ll direct you towards something that’ll that’ll fit the bill for you. Like, you know, asking questions is something as human beings, we have gotten worse and worse and worse at generationally speaking.

Yeah, I ask a lot of questions normally, and, you know, it’s kind of my profession as an attorney to ask lots of questions, and I feel like it serves me well when I go into a situation and don’t act as if I know anything, and just ask the dumb questions. And the people that I respect the most, many of them, are willing to ask dumb questions in a room full of smart people, and they they get smarter. So there you have it, asking lots of go out there everybody and ask lots of dumb questions, and it’s the best advice. I mean, I You’re appreciative to convert it, but I love hearing someone else say it, because it it’s the most meaningful way one can learn.

Yeah, once you get out of school, you’ve got to start asking, teaching yourself, or learning, getting around people who can teach you so you know, thank you, Andrew, for spending your time with us. Everybody go out and check out Andrew’s website, Andrew zimmern.com and buy some of his books, watch some of his content, cheer him on, as well as get involved yourselves and do something today. That’s what the motto of the show is, to get out there and do something today. So ask whoever’s the purveyor of your seafood, seafood store, grocery store, restaurants. Where did the seafood come from? And is it a good, sustainable source?

1,000%. People should get in the habit of, you know, the getting a couple apps on their website. You listed a whole bunch of them earlier. We talk about them all the time. But, you know, find an app that you trust and buy sustainable seafood.

There you go. Well, thank you again, Andrew, and we’ll look forward to collaborating with you going forward. It sounds like you guys are doing wonderful work out there in the world, and we all need to partner up with with people that are doing the work, and it makes it fun. And I think that’s one of the beauties of your story, is that you make it fun. You’ve got one of the coolest jobs of all time, and you’ve kind of created this amazing life. That’s a great lesson for everybody. They oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Just wanted to go out there and let everybody know to pick up a copy of the blue food cookbook. It comes out October 28 and I started reading it, and I, you know, there are beautiful pictures in there and a lot of great information.

So go check it out. The blue food cookbook by Andrew Zimmern. It’s a great, great book, and I’m looking forward to cooking up some of those recipes. Maybe, Andrew, you could tell us where some of your restaurants so those of us who might be in the geographic area could go out and and eat some of your cuisine firsthand.

Well, if you live in the Atlanta area, go to Patty and Frank’s at the Chattahoochee Works. Visit the Chattahoochee Works. I’m part of the group that owns and operates that food hall down in Atlanta. And you know the I really meant it, what I said before, just andrewzimmern.com is one stop shopping. Everything is on the nav bar at the top. Can’t miss it.

Okay. Well, we’ll go check it out.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, and good luck.

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