EDIBLE: How a James Beard award winner inspires smart eating.

My bad, Ethan James Evans. You deserve better.

It’s probably not fair, or at least not very nice, to burden a young nephew like you with news like this when you’ve only been out of the hatch and into the world a month and a half. But better you hear this sooner than later. You can’t survive on your mother’s milk forever.

Our food system prioritizes short-term productivity and profits over long-term environmental and human health. Our farms and feedlots are all too often pumped full of hormones and pesticides. Our fishing habits have chased a number of species to the brink of extinction.

Which is why our first lunch together came at The Greenhouse Tavern in your very own Cleveland, Ohio.

It’s there that Executive Chef Jonathon Sawyer has built up something so smart and savory with his Lake Walleye pike puttanescas, Tabasco chicken buckets and roasted pig heads that he won James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Great Lakes six weeks ago, almost exactly when you were born.

A big reason he deserved to win in my book: He serves as a member of the Seafood Watch Blue Ribbon Task Force, working with customers and other chefs on how to use the pioneering sustainable shopping guide to make it so little guys like you get to enjoy the same superlative seafood our generation does. (The goal of the task force, he says: “to inspire customers to ask: ‘Do you serve sustainable seafood?’”) In fact, he is so traumatized by the state of tuna that he has cut it out of his kitchens and his own diet completely.

“It’s a fish I love, but I don’t want to contribute to its extinction,” he writes in a recent Esquire piece. “In the past few years, we’ve consumed large fish at a higher rate than ever before. The international fishing community’s technological advances and lack of enforceable regulation have allowed us to fish deeper, farther, and longer to the point where 85 percent of the world’s fisheries are fished to capacity or overfished. We’re eating fish faster than most species can reproduce. Tuna and cod have turned out to be two of the biggest losers.”

I know. It can seem a little daunting. But he offers some manageable solutions, including delicious substitutes like West Coast sable, pole caught yellowtail (not yellowfin) or handline-caught West Coast swordfish.

“Make the choice to have tuna be reverential as opposed to routine,” he says.

His other advice: Download the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch app. “You have to ask way more questions than what’s on your app,” he says in a video up on the Aquarium’s Seafood Watch channel. “But on an entry level I found it really helpful.”

He had some other insights I wanted to pass along that came as part of a Sustainable Foods Institute panel in Monterey right after he won the James Beard.

“Food doesn’t have to be rare to be special,” he said. “It can be a lichen, or a moss or vegetable scraps.” That’s a beautiful way of looking at resourceful food preparation: Seeking out atypical or simply underappreciated items and using them creatively to make dishes more fun – as he says, “getting to a place where you can have luxury be sustainable.”

It’s certainly vivid on his menu, where I don’t miss tuna at all. I wish you could’ve tried his soft lettuce salad with crispy shallots and dynamite whole grain mustard vinaigrette or his “rice and beans” veggie burger with brown rice, cannellini beans and skunky house pickles beneath aged cheddar on a pillow-soft sweet roll.

Across his menus, ingenuity and intrigue make simple, well-sourced ingredients pop: think “pulled barbecue mushroom” sandwich with tofu mayo; hand-ground beef tartare; bahn mi dip with pork liver pâté; market fish fricassee; and “animal-style” Ohio potato hash with bacon, fried eggs, that memorable whole grain mustard, mozzarella curds and brown gravy.

“Our restaurants predicate themselves on being interesting,” Sawyer says.

More reason for optimism: Just this week Seafood Watch point person Sheila Bowman introduced the program to many more industry-leading chefs at the James Beard Foundation’s food-focused world’s fair called Expo Milano 2015. (Meanwhile, longtime local wine industry advocate Cheryl Warner and her ever-adventurous husband Dan are helping run the James Beard House Milan modeled after the original in NYC.) As they announced on World Oceans Day this week, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has partnered with Seafood Watch to mindfully source foodstuffs of the sea, and even teamed up with Sustainable Fisheries Partnership to fund development of fair trade fish standards and sustainable fishing/shrimping practices and improved water resource management in Vietnam and Thailand.

So maybe this isn’t such a dark letter, little frog. When the best chefs in the country take customer education and sustainability advocacy as part and parcel of their duties, there is hope.

And the fact that it’s happening here in your native city is only appropriate. Cleveland understands the power of hope better than any other place I know.

Quickbites

• After a successful Kickstarter campaign raised $10,000, Blue Aces Bake Shoppe (975-4714) opened at 8. W Gabilan St. in Oldtown Salinas Tuesday and promptly sold out of all its cake pops, custom cookies and clever macaroons. Hours to start are 7am-4pm Tuesday-Saturday.

• Monterey County Beer Week is fully flowing. Jump over to the blog for more.

• Coastal Living magazine just released its list of America’s Happiest Seaside towns and Monterey is the top ranked destination in the state, and seventh in the country. More on the blog.

• The storied Victorian on the corner of Lighthouse Avenue and 19th Street in Pacific Grove, built in 1893 by Dr. Andrew Jackson Hart, now serves tea in the afternoons.

• Stewardship props: Popular Passionfish restaurant paid for two cigarette butt “bait tanks” to be installed by the city of Pacific Grove at Lovers Point.

• Jurevich Farm, Prevedelli Farm and Pulido Farm return to local farmers markets this week with apricots, cherries and berries. Plus, locally-milled grains are now available at markets from T&L Coke Farm.

• The AIWF Monterey chapter hosts an Indian dinner – including tandoori chicken, Punjabi-style chole and Ventana wines – with the movie to match Wednesday, June 17. Dinner starts 5pm at Crema and The Hundred-Foot Journey plays next door in Lighthouse Cinema at 7:30pm. ($50/AIWF members, $60/non-members, $15/movie only, 761-8463 or 624-0830).

• The Gusto Radio Show debuts live from Gusto Handcrafted Pasta and Pizza in Seaside 6-7pm Saturday, June 13, on KION 101.1 FM and 1460 AM, hosted by Mark Carbonaroand David Marzetti: restaurant staff, customers and special guests all get appetites revving.

• Summer after-hours come to Twisted Roots patio 3-5pm June 20 and July 25. Guests receive complimentary small bites after purchase of a glass of wine (minimum $10). Food and wine is free to club members.

• Last week, Vivien Lindley got the nod for 2015 Agricultural Woman of the Year for Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties for years of work with groups like Gonzales Young Farmers, California Women for Agriculture and California Rodeo Salinas.

• Pope John Paul II: “The future starts today, not tomorrow.”