helicopter, from planes, boats. and the penalty for fishing in closed waters is you lose your license to fish in federal waters. federal waters start three miles from the beach so they ll lose their livelihood if they get caught fishing in closed areas. so they re testing fish. i know noaa is doing it, and they re looking for any, i don t know what the science of it is. they re looking for hydro carbons in the fish, actually the presence of oil in the fish. and they haven t found any. absolutely none. and the reports that i ve seen from the louisiana fish and game, the samples are taken that are sent to independent labs for testing and you can actually go to www.louisiana seafood.com and see those tests and see the actual tests being taken. i was skeptical going down there. i ve been fishing my entire life and i wanted to see what it was like down there. right. so when i got the opportunity to go, i was skeptical. i really
gulf coursing into the sea washing up on beaches, you have to wonder if any seafood from the gulf is safe to eat. well, one of the most famous chefs in the world decided to check it out for himself. he has a small empire of restaurants and his own tv show, tom collacio, and his own tv show, top chef was in the gulf last weekend and watched how they are testing fish and came away with this advice dig in. i spoke with him earlier about his trip. tom, so good to have you here. good being here. you went down to the gulf with a few other prominent chefs to sort of investigate i guess how safe the seafood was. tell us what you found. there were seven of us. we went down to grand isle and we were there sunday. we got there sunday afternoon and we spent we went out not actually in the gulf because it was a little rough with the storm coming in so we stayed in the bay. you could see that there were some areas in the marsh lands damaged by oil. a little oil here and there you saw on
worse. right. because it can get worse. this thing changes every day. so this is just in case it gets worse that she wants to get her suit on file now. but again, i think the message needs to be there is seafood there, fishermen are fishing and the fish is safe. i hope that message doesn t get lost in this lawsuit. and any chance i guess i can t let you go without asking you this, that your show, top chef will do something with this sort of idea of what s going on down there and try and work it into the story? we re currently in our seventh season and already shot the entire season with the exception of the finale but we re back in production probably sometime in early fall and i m going to try to make sure we do something with the gulf seafood, louisiana seafood. great to have you here. thanks. good to meet you. thanks for coming on. coming up, the battle over immigration reform is just beginning. why arizona governor jan brewer is angrier than ever while other leade
that we spent a lot of time with fishermen and families and talking to them just to try to get a better idea of what was going on there. there s sort of two stories right now i think you need to tell about the gulf. one, this is devastating. it s horrible what s going on down there. they need to stop this oil somehow some way. hopefully it will happen with this new well. but on the other hand there s a lot of hope. there are fishermen still fishing. right. the fishermen that aren t cleaning up the oil are actually fishing and the fish out of the gulf is safe. there s a lot of different agencies testing the waters, tissue samples being taken every day. i think over 300 since may. just to be clear they re not fishing in the oil spill area. no, no. 30% of the gulf is closed off to fishing. there is a huge buffer zone between where the oil is and areas you can fish. and it s being patroled by the coast guard from air, from