The Realities of Local, Sustainable Dining at Seaworld San Diego

I walked on to meet Chef Dave McHugh, who was setting up his special lunch buffet at "DINE with Killer Wales".

DINE is a restaurant where guests eat alongside trainers and splashing Orcas. Learning about how whales communicate and seeing them interact does wonders for the appetite, and here guests can return to the buffet multiple times to sample from a large array of dishes like kale and arugula salads, rice and quinoa, as well as fish, shrimp, and chicken or beef entrees. The cheesecake table and dessert towers were especially impressive. The poolside patio show and meal requires a reservation in addition to your entrance fee and is only open for lunch and breakfast on certain days.

I found Chef McHugh bending over a railing, snapping a few leaves off a low-growing herb.

"It smells like grandma's trunk," he said to me with a smile.  The small plot provides the herbs that garnish dishes for catered events that are held nearly every day of the year. Besides this garden, Chef McHugh is especially proud of the bakery items served throughout the park.

He explained that Seaworld's bakery runs in shifts, 24-hours a day, seven days a week, in order to meet the demand for sandwich bread, rolls, and all manner of desserts. Some of the bakery's thirty-five staff have been working at the park for twenty years and they are proud of the food they cook.

You can see the seasonal menus online, and if you have dietary restrictions, you can call ahead for specifics or speak to the staff in the park to request ingredient labels. McHugh and his team are happy to accommodate.

But how local and sustainable are the dishes on this buffet line or in the Shipwreck Reef Cafeteria?

Sustainability is a key value, the chef explained, with seafood chosen from the evolving Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List. Vegetables, like kale, come from farms in Salinas, the Central Valley region or Mexico, and cherry tomatoes come from greenhouses nearby. 

Salmon is brought in fresh from the Northwest where it's sustainably farmed and other seafood, like shrimp, is frozen and provided according to the MSC, the Marine Stewardship Council guidelines from farms approved by the Global Aquaculture Alliance.

In an effort to keep their carbon footprint down, Seaworld sources everything regionally. Chef McHugh explained that whenever possible they source items grown in California or no more than 350 miles and six hours away, but at their volume, hyper-local sourcing just isn’t possible at this time.

The volume of fruit and vegetables going through the park is stunning, even to McHugh. "One of the Commissary Cooks came to me and said, ‘Chef, we need more watermelon.' I said, ‘Like a couple of cases?’ and he said 'No, a couple pallets,' and each pallet holds 45 cases at 45 pounds each," chef McHugh said.

Eco-friendly efforts extend beyond the kitchen. Not one SeaWorld drink is served with a straw and it's been that way almost since the park opened. They also banned plastic bags in 2011 when the park put in the Turtle Reef display. All meal utensils are compostable and nothing is served in Styrofoam containers.

As far as food waste, all the refuse left from pairing and scooping seeds and rinds are taken off-park to a landfill where they're turned back into soil. That soil is being used at water-wise garden displays throughout the park. Unusable food is tracked and the park food production schedule is adjusted to keep food waste containers from overflowing. They even adjust prep shifts to make sure as little as possible ends up in the trash.

It would be wonderful to say that SeaWorld is sourcing all their ingredients locally, I would love to stroll through the park eating locally caught Halibut and veggies from San Diego County farms. But, like all of us who strive to live a local and environmentally-friendly lifestyle, we must do what we can, and continue to look for ways to do even more.

For accuracy, Seaworld's onsite claim about sourcing should use the word "region" or "California-based" instead of local as most people understand local to mean close by, and in our case, perhaps near the City of San Diego or  within the County of San Diego. There is nothing wrong, and indeed much to celebrate about the culinary team's awareness of and commitment to sourcing from as close as is feasible given their corporation's values and budget allocations.

SeaWorld has been actively working to rescue wildlife since their inception, they provide hundreds of local jobs, and operate under eco-friendly practices. And they continue to look for ways to improve and reduce their waste and impact. Change doesn’t happen in leaps and bounds, it happens one herb garden, one tomato, and yes, maybe one whale cookie, at a time.

Seaworld

500 Sea World Drive, Mission Bay