I admit I’m a Top Chef junkie, so when season 5 ended, I found myself going through a bit of withdrawal. While the Food Network doesn’t really do it for me, I decided to tune in to The Chopping Block, a newer show on NBC that features two teams going head-to-head, trying to run successful restaurants in New York City.

It’s not worth describing how the competition works, or details about the show, but I will say that it’s nowhere nearly as entertaining as Top Chef. Nevertheless, after being pretty bored with the pilot, I tuned in this week to see the second episode, to see if it picks up.

It didn’t. However, I was proud to see that for the first time on one of these shows, some food awareness actually played a role.

In Season 5 of Top Chef, one challenge actually took the chef-testants to Blue Hill Farm, where chef Dan Barber has made a name for himself by growing almost all his organic produce on site, as well as raising his own animals for the restaurant’s meat. While it was great to see how the chefs used what was local and seasonal, I was a bit disappointed that more about this wasn’t discussed by the chef-testants.

But on this week’s Chopping Block, conscious fish choices played a major role. The two teams were each to cook a dinner for two fashion designers and their friends. The red team gets designer Nicole Miller. Before going to meet her, they had to place their food order, and they made the regrettable decision that one of the courses would be Chilean Sea Bass.

Two of the chef-testants go off to meet Miller, and propose a course of the unsustainable fish. Miller not only doesn’t like Chilean Sea Bass, but she says, “It’s endangered,” and she would prefer halibut. The chef-testants look rather stunned, knowing that the order had already been placed.

They go back to their restaurant, and somehow get some halibut, but not enough, and it quickly runs out. During service, Miller overhears a waitperson telling a diner that the halibut ran out, but will be replaced with the Chilean Sea Bass. Miller is not happy; she marches into the kitchen and says something to the effect that an endangered fish will not be served at her party.

When guest judge Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue, comes in, he is first offered the Sea Bass. He too says “It’s endangered,” to which the server retorts,  “Not here it isn’t. We’ve got 25 pounds of it.” Steingarten chuckles at the joke, and then is offered a five-day-old piece of salmon (why this happens, I’m not sure), which he can tell is farmed. “No one should eat farmed salmon,” he later declares.

While I don’t think the fish debacle was ultimately responsible for the red team’s loss this week, it sure played a part. But I was just happy that these issues were being spoken about at all. Just as the Obamas planting an organic vegetable garden at the White House, Nicole Miller saying she won’t serve an endangered fish at her party makes a strong statement. People take notice of such things, and then, hopefully, begin to question their own choices. While I recognize that The Chopping Block was not the place for Steingarten to get on a soapbox and offer why farmed salmon is bad, the fact that he said “No one should eat farmed salmon” so adamantly, hopefully will send viewers to their computers to find out why not.

Related Post - A Meat Eater’s Dilemma: When Both Surf and Turf are Trouble