My guest today is Randy Hartnell, President of Vital Choice Wild Seafood & Organics, which he founded in 2001 with his wife Carla. He is responsible for guiding the company on its mission of providing consumers with high quality sustainable seafood, while educating them about the impact of their food choices on the environment, their health, and the commercial fishing community. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals found in seafood, the health benefits of seafood, how you can choose and purchase the safest seafood. Prior to founding Vital Choice, Randy spent 24 years as a commercial salmon and herring fisherman in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. He is a Washington state native and currently resides there with his wife in Bellingham. www.vitalchoice.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Safest Seafood
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Randy Hartnell
Date of Broadcast: January 15, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, January 15th 2015, 01-15-15. We’re having a winter day in Florida. It’s 67°, but it’s all gray and overcast and it feels like winter.
Today, we’re going to talk about seafood, which is something we haven’t really talked about before. I’ll just admit right up front that I don’t eat seafood at all at any time, so it’s not something that I’ve researched a lot. But I know a little bit about it, enough to know what the toxic exposures are and where to find the safest seafoods.
I just never have been able to eat seafoods since I was born. The first time my parents gave it to me, I was gagged. There’s just something about it that my body doesn’t tolerate. But that said, seafood is very healthy if you get good seafood. It’s a source of many nutrients that we’ll talk about. We’ll talk about how to prepare it and all of those things. I’m just saying that I’m a novice at this subject because I had no personal experience with it.
My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics, which he founded in 2001 with his wife, Carla. This is one of the best websites that sell seafood that I found. So we’re going to find out all about his very high quality seafood.
Hi, Randy.
RANDY HARTNELL: Hi, Debra. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.
DEBRA: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to have you. And you’re in Washington?
RANDY HARTNELL: I’m in Washington State up here in the northwest.
DEBRA: And what’s the weather like there?
RANDY HARTNELL: It’s a little overcast, kind of gray and probably a lot chillier than there, than where you’re at.
DEBRA: Yeah, is it raining?
RANDY HARTNELL: No, it’s not actually. We’ve been having a very mild winter.
DEBRA: Good!
RANDY HARTNELL: I haven’t touched my windshield yet.
DEBRA: Yeah, we’ve been having a mild winter too. So tell us, you used to be a fisherman. How did you get from being a fisherman to selling seafood?
RANDY HARTNELL: That’s right! I was a commercial fisherman for over 20 years. I loved it. I started going up there when I was in college to work my way through school and just fell in love with working out in nature and on the water. I did that until the late 2000’s, right around 2001.
We had a disruptive event happen in our industry over a period of time. The industrialization of salmon came on to the world scene in a big way. Whereas wild salmon from Alaska had previously constituted most of the wild salmon in the world, farm salmon basically came along and displaced it.
It was a lot cheaper. It was available year round. And so from a retailer’s standpoint, that was just a lot more profitable, a lot less hassle. And in spite of the fact that wild salmon was superior nutritionally, superior from an environmental standpoint, it tasted a lot better, basically consumers, all they knew was that farmed salmon was cheaper.
So in a period of couple of years, our prices collapsed and we couldn’t really make a living. It was a pretty devastating time in our industry. And so it’s really similar to what a lot of ranchers and farmers have experienced with the industrialization of these industry and basically every produce.
So I had to find something else to do. That something else ended up being Vital Choice.
DEBRA: Well, can you tell us something about what the fishing experience is like? I know that I’ve seen movies where they have scenes where the big boats go out and then they put the fish on ice and things, but is there anything that you can tell us that would give us more of an idea of what that experience is like between the fish in the water and it ending up in the store someplace?
RANDY HARTNELL: Sure! It varies quite a bit with the type of fish, the type of fishing methods used. I was involved with several different kinds of fisheries, but my primary fishery was a wild salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Fish come in seasonally. We even go up there every summer, in June. The fish would come in, we’d spend about six weeks and catch the fish.
Some of the boats take better care of them than others. My boat is refrigerated, so the fish were chilled. The openings are usually six or eight hours. And so after you’re done fishing, you’d deliver those to another boat that basically tenders them to either a processing ship or a processing client.
The industry has changed quite a bit, but basically probably 24 hours before those particular fish are chilled and cleaned. At that time, most of it was being canned for sale around the world. This is really one of the best foods on the planet really. Nothing goes into that can except that fresh salmon and maybe a little salt.
Increasingly, the demand for frozen product has occurred. In Europe, Asia, the rising middle classes around the world, they all want our Alaska salmon because it’s some of the best seafood on the planet – cleanest, best quality.
Ironically, a lot of Americans, still, they’re prone to buy the cheapest thing they can find and so they’ll buy a lot of the farm fish. The ironic thing is the best seafood that we’re raising or we’re harvesting is going offshore and we’re importing farmed shrimp, farm catfish, farm tilapia and all these stuff. They can’t come close to fetching an Alaska wild seafood nutritionally.
But anyway, as far as the quality goes and time to market, it really depends. A lot of people get hung up on the fresh versus frozen and all ‘fresh’ means is it’s never been frozen even though it may take a week to get from the fishing rounds to the store in Florida or Orlando actually. We spent a lot of time trying to educate people about this. If you take a really good quality fish out of the water, you clean it and freeze it right away. It stays that way until we thaw it. When the customer thaw it out, it’s going to taste the way it tasted out of the water. In many cases, frozen fish is going to be a better culinary experience than so-called fresh.
If you catch it yourself, if you’re down there in Florida, you have a lot of seafood and you catch it yourself, that’s one thing. But I travel around a lot, I always check out seafood in various restaurants. And a lot of times, it’s not very good. And I heard your introduction about how you had a really bad experience at an early age. Unfortunately, that’s the case for a lot of people. They get bad quality product and they just assume that all seafood tastes bad.
DEBRA: I may have. I mean, this was back in the fifties and so I may have gotten a piece of fish that had been sitting in a Styrofoam container wrapped in plastic full of mercury…
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, I doubt that that was it, it’s more the fats. The thing that makes seafood so incredibly healthy are those polyunsaturated fats, those omega 3’s. The thing about them is they’re incredibly unstable. That’s why we take it out of our food supply because they’re the enemy to shelf life.
And in fish, what that means is if they’re exposed to air, if fish is exposed to air for even a day or two, they start to oxidize. That’s what we know as its rancidity or fishiness and it just always amazes me how many people out there think that seafood tastes fishy because when you get good quality seafood and you take care of it and package it well, it doesn’t taste fishy at all.
I’m here in Seattle and last night, I went with some friends out to a local restaurant. We had a couple of different types of seafood. It was the most delicious meal. I would challenge anybody that thinks they don’t like seafood to let me set them up with a seafood meal. You wouldn’t believe a number of people I’ve converted over the years. I’m always just amazed. What I commonly hear is, “That doesn’t taste like fish.”
DEBRA: Well, maybe I should try your fish.
RANDY HARTNELL: I’d be happy to give you an option to help you do that.
DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. Well, we need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more with Randy Hartnell about this safest seafood. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics. Their website is VitalChoice.com. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafoods and Organics. That’s VitalChoice.com. We’re talking about seafoods, the safest seafood and the most delicious seafood, I’m told.
Randy, tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that are found in seafood that people might want to watch out for and why is it important to have seafood from pristine waters?
RANDY HARTNELL: Well, that’s an interesting question. There’s been methyl mercury in the ocean for thousands of years. They looked at specimens of hair from Eskimos that lived thousands of years ago and they had methyl mercury in them. A lot of people realized that life evolved in the ocean with a background presence of methyl mercury.
So to a certain extent, it’s there and we can handle fishes that have lower amounts. And if you look at the science, you look at the study, generally, around the world, the people that eat the most seafood are the healthiest.
DEBRA: Yes.
RANDY HARTNELL: They are the longest lived, they had some of the best infant mortality. I’m talking about major scientific studies where they looked at thousands of people and really you only have to look at Japan. The population of Japan including pregnant and nursing women are eating fish every day and they’re some of the healthiest people on the planet, not the sickest.
What happens is a lot of people focus on these trace levels of methyl mercury and other contaminants. We’re talking parts per billion or less. They totally forget about the good nutrients from seafood that aren’t in most of the land-based foods. Seafood, it just has the whole micronutrient spectrum. It’s got these incredible long chain omega 3 fats. And when you just focus the methyl mercury and you forget about all the benefit, you’re really doing yourself a disservice.
Now, to your question, you do want to focus on fish that’s obviously from clean waters. We knew that a lot of people were concerned about this and rightfully. And so we started our fish from the very beginning. We would submit samples to labs.
What we saw over the years, what we learned is that toxicity or methyl mercury in seafood is really a function of the species, the life cycle of the fish. And so generally, what you want to do is avoid longer lived fish because it tends to bio-accumulate over time in a larger fish.
So for instance, we source albacore tuna from one fisherman. But when he comes in and unloads his boat, he’s got albacore tuna that ranged from 4 or 5 pounds up to 50 or 60 lbs. and he buy only the smallest, two or three years old. They had the lowest contaminant levels and also the highest levels of these healthy fats.
DEBRA: Well, let me ask you about that because if you’re just going to the store or the fish market and you want to buy some tuna, how would you know what sized fish that piece of tuna came from?
RANDY HARTNELL: You would not know. It’s impossible to know. In fact, you could be pretty sure that what you’re getting is just the opposite, you’re getting the largest. The commercial path is we don’t like the little fish because they’re relatively low yield, they’re more expensive to process. In contrary, they like the bigger fish, which tend to have the highest contaminant levels and the lowest methyl mercury levels.
So for instance, if you buy a can of the albacore tuna that we’re sourcing, it’s got maybe 1 ½ to 3 grams of omega 3 fatty acids per serving. If you go into a grocery store and you buy albacore tuna off the shelf, it’s almost negligible. We’ve tested this numerous times.
And so not only is it that higher contaminant level. It’s got much lower levels of the good fats. And that’s just a function of the type of fish that they source. They’re both albacore tuna, but the bigger fish that are down deep have a higher contaminant levels than the lower levels, compared to the smaller fish that are caught by hook and line.
A couple of studies that came out a few years ago upon which the FDA based their advice to pregnant and nursing women to restrict seafood consumption. This is in 2004. They were based on two studies. One was in the Faroe islands of Denmark and one was in New Zealand. And they saw the higher the fish consumption along these pregnant women, they really begin to see problems with their children over the course of the years.
But when we went back and looked at it, when the scientists went back, we realized that in the Faroe Islands, people were eating pilot whales, which is at the top of the food chain, highly contaminated marine mammal. In New Zealand, they were eating shark, which again is a top of the food chain fish that lives a long time, has a relatively high contaminant levels.
On the contrary, when you look at populations that are eating normal seafood that you would get in the grocery store, most grocery stores, the contaminant level is much lower. What we’ve done is we’re very selective. We don’t have to produce large volumes to go into grocery stores. We just sell over our website and so we can go to the fishermen and say, “We only want your smaller fish. We only want your halibut.” We only buy halibut 25 lbs. and under. Halibut can get up to hundreds of pounds.
And so to answer your question. When you go to the store, you don’t really know what you’re getting.
DEBRA: But if somebody buys from you, then they do know what they’re getting because you have very specific criteria.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes, because we buy what we want to eat. Our family eats far more fish than anybody and so we just kind of practice – we just buy what we know is healthiest for ourselves and then source the same thing for our customers.
But I have to say that while we do that – and I’ve been doing this for a dozen years now, I go to scientific conferences around the world and I’ve developed friendships with some of the leading scientists in this realm, just some really wonderful people not connected to industry. They appreciate meeting our company because we’re providing food that they recognize being the healthiest out there. But what they will tell you is that there is no evidence, really no evidence…
DEBRA: Hold on, Randy. We’ll come back after the break because the music is kind of taking over. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Randy Hartnell, president of Vital Choice Seafood and Organics. We’ll be right back after the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell from Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics. I’m at the website now and we’re going to talk about all these great products. I’m just looking and there’s so many things. There’s basically – well, I’ll let you explain. Go ahead. Tell us about your products.
RANDY HARTNELL: Well, when we started out a few years ago, we mainly had salmon and halibut. And over the years, people have requested other products and we do have access. Both my partner and I had spent many, many years in the industry. We had a lot of contacts with our suppliers and with fishermen. And so we had access to really great products over the years. We just keep adding, adding things.
In fact, this last year, we even branched out from seafood and added some organic, grass-fed beef.
DEBRA: I saw that.
RANDY HARTNELL: We had customers that were asking for that and we had a great supplier real close to us here in Washington and so we put some of that out.
DEBRA: But basically, it looks like that your choices are really centered around salmon, cod, tuna, halibut and particularly, there’s a lot of salmon, wild salmon, wild Alaskan salmon in a lot of different forms from canned to – you’ve got a whole section here that has salmon burgers and salmon sausage and salmon bacon and all these things that are made out of salmon.
RANDY HARTNELL: [Inaudible 00:28:18]
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. But there’s also different kinds of salmon here. So tell us what the difference is. You’ve got sockeye and king and silver and smoked salmon.
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, the salmon is just an amazing, amazing animal. There are five different species. The biggest one is the king salmon. It’s the fattiest, richest, the least common so it’s going to be the most expensive. There’s the silver salmon. There’s the sockeye salmon. Sockeye salmon is our signature product. It’s a really abundant fish from Alaska and British Columbian primarily. There’s some coho salmon or silver salmon or pink salmon.
The main difference between the different species is when they’re going through their life cycle, they occupy different niches in the river system. That translates into – and when the fish comes back from the ocean (I don’t know how much you know about the life cycle of salmon), basically…
DEBRA: Well, actually, let me tell you, I know a lot about it because I used to live in Northern California right near Point Reyes National Seashore. And so the salmon would come up our creek in the [inaudible 00:29:41] valley. And in our community, we would celebrate the return of the salmon. We would all go stand down at the bridge and watch the salmon jump.
Anso I actually have a big affinity for salmon from doing that. It’s an amazing thing to see the salmon coming up…
RANDY HARTNELL: It really is. It’s just an amazing animal. The more you know about it, the more fascinating it is. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that when the salmon – they’re boarding the river, some fresh water. They migrate out as a little tiny smolt into the ocean. There’s a lot more food out in the ocean, so they grow rapidly out there. And then, roughly, on average, three to four years later, they will migrate back to the very same river, the very same spawning beds that they were born.
I forget where we were going with this. Oh, I remember. So a lot of times, the salmon (especially the king salmon and the sockeye), their spawning beds maybe hundreds of miles up that river. And once they get back in that river and they’re heading to those spawning beds, there really isn’t any food in the river, very little. So they’re not eating. And so they have to be carrying all the calories, all the energy that they’re going to need to get to those spawning grounds.
And so the species like the sockeye and the king salmon, they’d have to migrate the farthest. They’ll have the highest fat level. That translates into rich, just a really wonderful eating experience. You can get Alaska sockeye salmon from one river, but maybe it has to only migrate for a day and that will have like maybe half the fat as a sockeye and some of the larger ones that might have to migrate for two weeks. So you can have a dramatically different culinary experience depending on where that fish is from.
And so what we do to make sure that our customers are only eating the best is we tend to target fish that are from river systems where they have these higher fat levels.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful. And I just want to comment because of my experience living in Northern California. Actually, I was born there. I spent 12 years living in the [Inaudible 00:31:58] valley in Marin County, which is right across the Columbia Bridge from San Francisco and I lived out in that rural area.
Because I was able to live so close to nature and we had organic farms and we had the salmon and all these things, I became really aware of the whole idea of local food. It’s much more difficult to eat local here in Florida than it was for me to eat local when I lived in California. I just loved the stories behind the food that is completely missing in supermarket food. I loved the story that you’re telling about how much fat is in the fish depends on how far their spawning grounds are from the ocean.
I just think that if people knew these stories about their food more, then we would have much more appreciation for the food, that we’d have much more connection of the food coming from nature and our connection with nature.
So many people think that food comes from the supermarket and they have no idea that this fish is like going up river against the current of the river. It’s just like this big, whole journey to get back to the spawning grounds. And it affects your culinary experience. I just think these stories are so wonderful.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes. And beyond that, the fisheries in Alaska, really, the management of those fishers is such that – well, you know, around the world, most wild salmon have disappeared and a lot of that has to do with the loss of their habitat. The east coast, they dammed most of there, so there really are no commercially available wild salmon from the north east. All the Atlantic salmon that’s out there, that’s pretty much 100% farmed salmon.
But in Alaska, the habitat is still pristine. We’re fighting to keep it that way. Consequently, we still have these magnificent salmon [inaudible 00:34:01]. Two years ago, over 200 million pink salmon returned to Alaska. That was the biggest on record. A lot of people are getting the impression that we’re wiping out all the wild salmon. We hear all the bad news about wild salmon. But really, it’s a different story in Alaska because we’ve protected the habitat.
This year, 15 million sockeye salmon are predicted to return to Crystal Bay alone. That’s just one region out of 34,000 miles of [inaudible 00:34:29] up here. The best part of that story is it only takes about 15% to 20% of those fish to replenish the spawning ground. So the rest is harvestable surplus.
DEBRA: Good! We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the founder of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics and we’re learning about salmon and other seafood. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the founder of Vital Choice Wild Seafoods and Organics where they sell wild seafood. A lot of it, all different kinds, I’m looking here. They’ve got wild shrimp and shell fish, calamari, prawns, crabs, oysters. And listen to this. I’m looking at this description and it says, “Our pure sweetly delicious Pacific spot prawns are hand-harvested off British Columbia, packed in seawater upon harvest and fresh frozen onboard.”
And so it’s just like that whe you thought out these prawns, it’s just like you were just right there on the boat, yes?
RANDY HARTNELL: That’s right. It wasn’t easy for us to find a fisherman that was willing to do that. But fortunately, we did find a couple of them. And what’s happening there again, this is some of the highest quality seafood you can find and we’re just increasing the man for it around the world.
Maybe you’re familiar with this. The Fukushima radiation disaster in Japan, it just has made Alaska seafood in that much more demand. So you can see from the prices there that it’s not cheap, but we never let price dictate what we source. We go out and we find the very best quality of all the different types of seafoods and we pay the fisherman – well, we need to pay them to get it and add a margin so that we can survive and that’s what it is.
We’ve become so accustomed to cheap food in this country and it’s reflected in our health. We’re one of the sickest populations on the planet because we’re eating all these industrial pollutants. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
DEBRA: No, but I would just like to interject that people complain about the cost of food, but they forget that medical bills cost so much more. I would rather spend the money on the food and be well than spend money on medical bills and be sick.
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, my dad used to say as far back as I can remember, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” I’m getting older and I’m watching just so many people around me, their poor lifestyle and their diet are catching up to them.
He also used to say, “Don’t be too soon old and too late smart.” What we find is a lot of people, until they get a wake-up call, they really don’t hear it.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s exactly right.
RANDY HARTNELL: We spend a lot of time trying to educate people about that and provide them with that. That’s why we’re called Vital Choice because there’s nothing more important than your health and nothing impacts your health more than what you choose to eat.
DEBRA: I do want to mention – because this is the last segment and we only have a few minutes left. I want to make sure that I mention that you have a lot of information on your website about how pure your products are. You do testing. It talks about it on your website. You’re testing and also, that your cans are not the type that have BPA in it. Some of your products come in cans, some in pouches. So you’ve looked at the packaging as well as the purity of the fish.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yeah. We basically run our business. We started out as a family-ran business. We’ve got non-family people now. We basically just run our business based on the golden rule. We source products and package it in maybe what we want to consume. We’re as aware of this as anybody. We have thousands of customers and they tend to be customers that are highly conscientious and they’re concerned about this. And so we do our best to source things that we all want to eat and pack it in ways that are known to the safest.
Life is a terminal disease. There’s no way we can get rid of all the potential contaminants. It’s all out there. But I think what people fail to recognize is if you’re eating good quality food, it supports your immune system, it supports your cell health, your cellular health and you’re better able to combat these threats from our environment.
One of the best examples if I could just take a second is seafood is one of the richest sources of selenium and selenium is a natural antidote to methyl mercury. We have a lot more on our website about that if you want to just type in ‘selenium’ and ‘methyl mercury’. You can read all kinds of things. That’s just one example.
You know, I’ve seen over the years, people that are so focused on the toxic aspect of it that they forget about just how important it is to invest more in good food and protect yourself from these threats.
DEBRA: Just to back up to what you just said about the selenium, one of the things that I learned was that in nature – I learned this from an herbalist on an herb blog – is that in nature, the antidote to the poison grows right next to it. And so if you have something like a toxic mushroom or something, the antidote, you just look around and the antidote is there. I thought that that was a fascinating thing.
But of course, nature would do that. Nature would have that kind of balance. If there’s methyl mercury there and it’s a naturally occurring thing, that there would also be in the fish the antidote. It would be right in it.
In the industrial world, things are not created that way. It’s just industrial chemicals are industrial chemicals and the antidote is not right there.
RANDY HARTNELL: Great point, great point. That’s a perfect example, seafood because what makes methyl mercury toxic is that it binds the selenium in our cells. And every cell in our body requires selenium to function properly. And so if you’re getting methyl mercury and no selenium, then you run a selenium deficit and you have problems.
Seafood is one of the richest sources of selenium, so you’re replenishing any that gets locked up by the methyl mercury. There’s quite a bit of science about this. We’ve known it since the sixties. It doesn’t get much exposure in the press.
DEBRA: That’s so good to hear. Well, I’ll make sure that people know about it because they will hear this interview.
And also, before we go, I want to make sure that people know about your ‘In the Kitchen’ section on your website. We’ve got all these videos telling people how to prepare – you want to tell us about some of the videos?
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes, a lot of people are sort of intimidated about seafood. A lot of people are worried about it smelling up their house. And again, that goes back to quality. If you get good quality seafood, it’s not fishy. We travel around the country and we set up our grill and our booth, I cooked our salmon in hotels and conference centers and I’ve never, ever had anybody ask me to leave. So first of all, if you have good seafood, it doesn’t smell up your house.
Second of all, it’s just so simple. You can take one of these frozen pieces of salmon out of your freezer, thaw out in 15 or 20 minutes, put it in the oven or a pan and in 10 minutes, you have a gourmet meal with some of the healthiest food on earth. We wanted to share that. So we created a series of just short 1-minute videos that are on our website.
If I could, Debra, I also want to mention that we have our fantastic science-based newsletter that we send out every week. It’s called Vital Choice newsletter that you can sign up for on our website.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m glad you mentioned that because I have been subscribing to your newsletter for years and you always have interesting things to read, always.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yeah. It’s been great, yes. We’ve got over a hundred thousand people read it. I feel more like we’re just as committed to education as we are to providing good food. It’s kind of our passion, to help people understand just how important this is.
DEBRA: That’s great, that’s great. So what’s your favorite seafood dish, your favorite way to eat seafood?
RANDY HARTNELL: You may be surprised to learn that I eat probably more canned salmon than just about anything because it’s so easy, it’s so portable, it’s nutritious. You could put it over and it’s ready to eat. So you can pour it over a salad or stir it into a pasta or rice. It’s just very easy.
As far as our frozen products, I probably eat more of our sockeye and king salmon. Last night, we were at dinner at this great restaurant, a seafood restaurant in Seattle and I was just so torn because the sablefish or black cod is just – I’m not sure if you’ve had. Well, I know you haven’t.
DEBRA: I haven’t had that, but some of my listeners might.
RANDY HARTNELL: It is one of the most incredibly, wonderful, delicious fish. But they also have some winter king salmon that were just coming fresh from Alaska. So we were all torn as to which one to have. Sablefish comes from – it’s caught at about 2000 ft. to 3000 ft. down in icy cold waters and it’s just the richest, the most delicious thing.
It’s kind of like asking the person which is their favorite [inaudible 00:49:01]. It’s apples and oranges. They’re all good. We encourage people to experiment and try them all.
DEBRA: Yes. I mean, you even have wild salmon caviar. I think you have salmon in every form there is, it looks like to me.
RANDY HARTNELL: I will admit that that’s what I had for breakfast. It’s like rocket fuel for the brain. It’s pure, healthy, omega 3 fats. We try to please as many people as we can. We get the demand or requests for all kinds of seafoods.
DEBRA: Good. Well, we’ve come to the end of our time. Thank you so much for being here with me. I’ve learned a lot. I think my listeners have learned a lot. Again, you can go to their website, VitalChoice.com and sign up for their newsletter and try their food. We’re at the end of our time. Thank you so much! You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
