How chefs talk about sustainable seafood: understanding the role of affect in sustainability judgements

Sustainable seafood has emerged in recent years as an important issue for an increasing number of chefs who have emerged as prominent media and public voices on what constitutes “sustainability” with respect to fish and seafood. This article investigates how such chefs talk about and assess seafood sustainability via interviews with eight media-active Australian chefs for whom sustainable seafood is central to their personal and professional brands. We argue that scientific judgments work alongside personal, affective responses in shaping these chefs’ sustainability assessments, as revealed across four key themes: trusted relationships; care and intimacy; visceral entanglements; and disgust. We show how the chefs’ prioritization of interpersonal relationships, combined with their sustained distrust of suppliers and visceral reactions to industrial fishing practices, lead them to prioritize small-scale and artisanal fisheries and relationships of care for individual fish. Understanding how sustainability feels, then, is essential to understanding the processes through which certain kinds of fish come to be discursively constructed as sustainable (or not), as well as the types of sustainability practices that come to be communicated as most preferable and desirable.