Barton Seaver is a chef with a mission: to rekindle America’s taste for abundant seafood. His new book catalogues more than 500 species of seafood interspersed with recipes, photographs, and an extensive history of America’s relationship with food from the sea. Host Steve Curwood joins Seaver at a dockside fish market in Portland, Maine to scope out the freshest, most sustainable fish and shellfish – and then, they shuck oysters and cook up some tasty, fishery-friendly mackerel in his kitchen.

This week in Beyond the Headlines, Peter Dykstra and host Steve Curwood discuss the rapid rise in people registering for federal disaster aid after this year’s record-breaking hurricanes, wild fires and floods. Then they note how the Pope regards climate denial, and remember an infamous environmental computer hack.

The Silicon Valley-based company Impossible Foods is aiming primarily at carnivores with its Impossible Burger, genetically engineered from plant protein to look and taste as much as possible like red meat. It’s already available in some restaurants. Fordham University Professor Garrett Broad joins host Steve Curwood to examine plant-based meat’s culinary and regulatory future.

The offerings of meat substitutes for vegetarians and vegans have leapt forward in recent years but for most meat-eaters, nothing quite measures up to the real thing. That’s what companies like Impossible Foods are trying to change. Using a complex combination of plant proteins, along with a key genetically-engineered ingredient, the company has a plant-based burger intended to appeal to carnivores. Living on Earth’s Savannah Christiansen and Noble Ingram join a crowd of hungry students in Cambridge, Massachusetts to sample the burger, for a taste test.

One of President Trump’s first actions was to reverse his predecessor’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline project to carry carbon-heavy tar-sands crude from Canada to Texas. The final official step to realizing the project was a Nebraska Commission’s approval of the pipeline route, which it’s now given. But the route is not the one the company preferred. As Living on Earth’s Jaime Kaiser explains, this gives pipeline opponents hope and possible cause to continue their fight, and may help put the economic feasibility of the project in jeopardy.