This interview with Taras Grescoe about his book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood got me thinking. In the interview, Grescoe gets into some detail about which fishes you should avoid and which you should seek if you want to support sustainable fishing practices. This information isn't entirely new to me, as I've spent some time browsing the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch website in the past, but I admit that I rarely keep these considerations in mind when I'm at the seafood counter or at a restaurant. (I've been pretty good in avoiding swordfish and Chilean sea bass, but salmon and shrimp are hard to resist.)

I'm also in the midst of reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, so recently I've been overwhelmed with information about sustainable and ethical living. It seems to me that there's no way even an informed and conscious eater could manage to weigh and measure all the various consequences of their daily routines without resorting to a life of ascetism or obsession, and even then the inevitable unpredictability of this complex world is likely to lead you to misinformed behavior.

So what kinds of decisions should a concerned individual make to best support sustainable living? Is it more important to eat locally, eat the right seafood, cut down beef consumption, or something else? The answer of course depends on what issues are subjectively more important to you.

Ideally, I'd have access to a reliable tool where I could go and add moral weights to a slate of issues: energy independence, pollution, biodiversity, animal cruelty, human rights, etc. The tool would then display a ranked list of lifestyle changes that would best further your moral goals, so that you could, e.g., choose to focus more of your efforts on cutting your beef consumption than avoiding farmed shrimp. Such a tool would be even more useful if it could also be relevant for the average suburban American -- e.g., what are the best fast food restaurants to patronize, or the best dishes at Applebee's?

This tool certainly would have to be built upon expert opinion to determine how the weighted issues relate to each lifestyle change, and even then there's still no way to avoid some level of arbitrariness and uncertainty. But, if possible, it would be good to have some knowledgeable filter on ethical living that doesn't solely rely on television newsmagazines, government regulation, or market forces.

In truth, I wouldn't expect that such a tool would be accurate and effective in practice due to the sheer complexity of the world, but I'd like to try one anyway out of curiosity. It'd be like one of those candidate picker websites. Anyone have a link?

Last year, I expressed dismay at the results of local alt-weekly City Life's Best of the Valley 2006 choices, submitted by local readers. If you recall, Vegas readers chose unique establishments such as The Olive Garden for Best Italian and P.F. Chang's for Best Chinese. I promised that I would submit a 2006 entry, and I plan to mail it in tomorrow. It's only fair that I publish my own Food & Drink choices, so here they are. Let me know where I've gone wrong:

• Best non-chain restaurant: Rosemary's
• Best cheap eats: In 'n Out
• Best pricey eats: Okada
• Best late-night dining: Paymon's Meditteranean Grill (on Maryland Parkway)
• Best place to take a date when you really want to get laid: Firefly
• Best steakhouse: [No answer. I've been to very few.]
• Best Mexican restaurant: Lindo Michoacan
• Best Chinese restaurant: Little Buddha [Although I've heard Joyful House is good.]
• Best Italian restaurant: Pasta Shop
• Best Thai restaurant: Lotus of Siam
• Best Indian restaurant: Origin India
• Best buffet: [No answer. None have been the "best."]
• Best sushi: I Love Sushi
• Best beer selection: Freakin' Frog
• Best coffeehouse: Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (on Maryland Parkway) [Sorry for the chain. I don't drink much coffee.[
• Best looking wait stuff staff: [No answer.]
• Best wine selection: Lotus of Siam [Pages and pages of reislings.]

Only one of my above answers (Okada) is on The Strip. I can't afford to go to most of the top restaurants there, but even if I could, I'd prefer to recommend off-Strip locations.

OK, so maybe Las Vegas is in critical need of a cultural overhaul. This week's CityLife cover story is a reader-polled Best of the Las Vegas Valley compilation. I've been looking forward to this issue since I first heard about it soon after I moved here in September. Boy, am I disappointed.

Let's start at the bottom, shall we? I almost drove into a telephone pole when I was told the winner for Best Italian Restaurant: The Olive Garden. At least the editors weren't happy about it either:

OK, we were willing to let you slide on P.F. Chang's, but the freaking Olive Garden?! Are you kidding us? Yeah, we know, when you're there you're family, and you love those darn breadsticks. But in a town with more than its share of authentic Italian chefs slaving away in restaurant kitchens, if the best Italian food you can find is at the Olive Garden, you really ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Get off your asses and do some exploring, will you, or you won't be allowed to play this game again next year.

Culture that I don't cotton to is one thing, but no local culture at all is something I can't tolerate. By choosing a restaurant or a coffee shop (Best Coffee House: Starbucks) that can be found in virtually any city, you might as well be saying that Vegas has nothing to offer outside of the Strip -- and I know this isn't true. In fact, Vegas has all sorts of creative establishments that could've been highlighted here, but either its citizens are too lazy to go find them or the people who frequent them didn't bother to send in their selections to CityLife. To be fair, they did pick the best Mexican restaurant I've been to so far (Lindo Michoacan) and there are other selections that intrigue me.

I think CityLife shoulders a little of the blame here. How come they didn't offer the "CityLife Pick" for each category? It would've added an alternative viewpoint to the mix, something that was sorely lacking in the article. And of course I'm to blame a little myself for not participating in the voting. But as a new resident, I think it's excusable for me to wait until next year, when I promise I'll send in an entry.