It's not often you get invited to a tasting event for a species the organizers are looking to save.

But that's what Trout Unlimited, a sportfishing advocacy group, and New Seasons Market cooked up this weekend at the grocery chain's nine metro-area stores on behalf of Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon.

The Bristol Bay salmon run, which encompasses five rivers in southwest Alaska, is far from endangered.

A Portland, Ore., grocer’s commitment to wild Alaska seafood is paying off handsomely for a Naknek fishing family now delivering nearly 2,000 pounds of Bristol Bay sockeyes a week to the market.

“It’s great so far,” said Izetta Chambers of Naknek Family Fishing, who struck a deal with the Portland grocery chain New Seasons Markets, to sell Bristol Bay sockeye at eight New Seasons stores in the Portland area.

The New Seasons’ sales have exploded the market base for the Naknek family, whose other customers are local sports lodges and the Brooks Camp.

Add lobbyist to the job description of chef. That is, if you're a chef like Greg Higgins, who takes his food politics as seriously as his mise en place. Led by a gal from Berkeley named Alice Waters, Higgins and fellow food professionals (including Peter Roscoe of Fulio's Pastaria in Astoria and former Seattleite Charles Ramseyer, now executive chef at New York's Wild Salmon) stepped out of the kitchen in early May to join fishermen, seafood brokers and other salmon champions for a week of politicking in Washington, D.C.

Here's a political movement I can get behind: "Vote With Your Fork" to protect and promote wild salmon.

This movement was cooked up by the folks who catch fish and those who cook it. They teamed up with an activist organization called "Save Our Wild Salmon."