Michel Nischan grew up with a deep appreciation for sustainable agriculture and those who work the land. “My mom was the daughter of Missouri farmers and would have been one herself if it hadn’t become so difficult to be a small-scale farmer,” he says.

“She planted really great gardens in our backyard in Illinois. In the winter you’d open our garage door and there would be stacks and stacks of neatly marked cases of Ball Mason jars filled with banana peppers, green beans, pickled carp and beets, tomatoes—all kinds of stuff.”

His mom encouraged him to get his first cooking job, and more than 30 years later, Nischan is a celebrated chef and cookbook author. At Dressing Room: A Homegrown Restaurant, Nischan focuses on supporting local and regional farmers, fisherman and producers.

For him, food is inextricably linked to the people who grow or catch it, and he believes that buying sustainable food supports human communities as well as natural ecosystems. "I feel that trawl-catching cod is the equivalent of genetically modified corn agriculture—you're decimating ecosystems," he says.

“I also look at what large corporate commercial trawlers have done to destroy the fisheries for the day boats. You go up to Maine and see fishing families that now rely on food stamps to feed their families. You see what once were beautiful fishing villages—that had fishing families, and stories, and recipes and provided real economic stability—and now they’re gone.”

For Nischan, buying and eating sustainable seafood is a win-win proposition. “Save a species and save a fishing community,” he says.  And the positive changes he’s seen in his lifetime give him great hope. He’s watched the local farm food movement blossom, and seen first-hand that ecosystems can recover when given a chance.

“I’m from the Midwest, so I remember Lake Erie being a dead lake—no fish of any kind. And then the steel industry collapsed and all of a sudden Lake Erie recovered. The whitefish came back, the perch came back.

“So when I look at that and the progress that we’ve made, I’m not gloom and doom. I have great hope, I really believe in nature’s uncanny ability to heal itself.”