This regular column is devoted to you, our subscribers. Seafood Choices recently sat down with two individuals who connect environmental issues from land to sea, and from farm to table. Sally Eason is the owner of the Sunburst Trout Company in Canton, North Carolina. Founded in 1948, the company markets farmed rainbow trout and trout roe. Peter Hoffman is the chef and owner of Savoy, a Mediterranean restaurant in New York City that he opened with his wife in 1990. Hoffman is also the national chair of the Chefs Collaborative, an organization promoting local, seasonal, and artisanal foods.

Here’s what they had to say in support of making smart seafood choices.

Sally Eason, owner of the Sunburst Trout Company: I’ve always been interested in sustaining anything that belongs to our environment. My parents were that way long before it was avant-garde to be that way, so I was raised to think along those lines. And I have a business that makes it easy to go along with the idea of sustainable foods. I have always lived in an agricultural area, so being environmentally aware is in the foreground for those living around me. If we all don’t get on this bandwagon, eventually we’ll have nothing to eat. Not in our lifetimes, but maybe in our grandchildren’s. I believe that everyone involved in the aquaculture industry worldwide needs to be more responsible, both personally and corporately.

I find there are more and more people each year who subscribe to the same philosophy. And I think that as the global consciousness shifts, people will realize that we will have to pay more money to get the foods that are not stealing constantly from our lands and our waters. It will be gradual, but we are going to have to shift our mindset to be more responsible.