Call me naive, but when I wrote this column last month, I honestly didn't expect that as the Fourth of July rolled around, oil would still be gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well and into the Gulf of Mexico. Surely someone would've found a way to stem the flow. I didn't think I'd find myself back at my desk, writing about an ongoing — and worsening — situation.

My family recently spent a week in Perdido Key, a small resort area halfway between Gulf Shores, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla. I planned to use my vacation to get a firsthand account of whether the spill was affecting the people and the food in that tiny gulf community.

When we arrived on Memorial Day weekend, the beaches and restaurants were teeming with children, parents and grandparents determined to enjoy their holiday. They lounged in the sand and frolicked in the emerald-green surf as though things were totally copacetic and a potential environmental catastrophe wasn't unfolding miles offshore. "We had a really nice Memorial Day," admits Rusty Bizzell, owner of the Sunset Grille in Perdido Key's Holiday Harbor Marina.

In fact, though, within two weeks of the spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had deemed waters from the Mississippi River to Pensacola contaminated and called a halt to commercial and recreational fishing there. By the last days of June, the closed waters had grown to encompass 80,228 square miles — that's an area only slightly less than the size of Kansas and roughly 33 percent of the gulf's "exclusive economic zone" waters. "I compare it to owning a service station off the interstate," continues Bizzell, "and then they close the interstate."

By May 24, the federal government declared a so-called fisheries disaster in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. "There's still good product out there," insists Bizzell. "But I have to go to Texas for shrimp and oysters." For other popular fish, he has to go east of Pensacola. "Crab claws are practically nonexistent," he adds. "I could get them, but the price would be so high I couldn't afford to sell them."

It's not just the usual suspects that could be affected by the spill. A recent New York Times article reports that the already overfished bluefin tuna "uses the Gulf of Mexico as a prime spawning ground, and ... one of the spawning areas in the gulf favored by bluefin is in the vicinity of the spill. ... Given that a single female fish can produce tens of millions of eggs, scientists say that many billions of them would have been in the water on April 20. The vast majority of those would never survive to adulthood even in normal times; now bathed in oil, fewer will make it."

In the kitchen where we stayed in Perdido Key, there's a magnet on the refrigerator with color illustrations of all the major fish of the Gulf of Mexico. The standard "seafood" fish are there: flounder, grouper, snapper, triggerfish, wahoo, amberjack, and yes, tuna. I must've looked at that magnet a thousand times, and I never paid it much mind except to note the names of
the fish I'd never seen on a menu:
sheepshead, vermillion, scamp and bonita, for example. Much like the matchbook from Windows on the World restaurant in the North Tower of the World Trade Center I recently found in the pocket of an old coat, the magnet suddenly looks more like a keepsake, a reminder of what life was like before a tragic historic event.

People have been calling governors of Gulf Coast states asking what they can do to help. Bizzell is frank about it: "We need warm bodies. They can help by coming down here and going to lunch or buying a T-shirt."

I'm all for supporting him and other Gulf Coast citizens in danger of losing their livelihoods and, in some cases, their way of life. But I can't help but think about a statistic cited by author Paul Greenberg in the New York Times Magazine: "Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China." And one reader of last month's column offered a thought-provoking comment: "It's really telling how humans refer to the denizens of our seas and oceans as 'seafood,' assuming that they're there for us to kill and eat."

According to one study conducted by the University of Minnesota and Louisiana State University, Americans actually are changing their habits in response to the spill: 44 percent of those surveyed said they would only eat seafood they know does not come from the Gulf. What you choose to eat is a personal decision, but it seems to me that, especially during this critical time, we should be more thoughtful about the seafood we choose — or maybe reconsider whether we should eat it in the first place.

Laurel Gladden is a freelance writer in Santa Fe. Contact her at the.ethical.epicure@gmail.com.