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More on sustainable seafood - good, bad and ugly
October 19, 2007

It seems that my piece on farmed salmon generated a bit of controversy and hostility. My objective for the entry was to express the concern of a responsible consumer – what is good fish and what is bad fish. Though the definitions of good and bad are not entirely clear-cut, factors commonly considered are:

Quality of the fish – valuable nutrients and low toxins

If wild, how abundant the fish stock is and how they are caught – Dredging and gillnetting result in significant bycatch, including dolphins and sea turtles. Harpooning and hook-and-lining are environmentally responsible ways of fishing. Wait, there is also Purse Seining, traps and pots, longlining, trawling, trolling… Who’d know there are so many right ways and wrong way of catching fish?

If farmed, how they are farmed – According to Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood watch, “Open net pens and cages enclose fish in offshore coastal areas or in freshwater lakes. Salmon and tuna are typically raised in net pens or cages.” Issues include: waste from the fish freely passing into the surrounding environment and polluting wild habitat and Diseases and parasites spreading to wild fish living near or swimming past net pens. Other ways of farming fish include pond, raceways, or Recirculating Systems. Again who’d know there are so many ways of farming fish?

As a responsible consumer, I want to be educated about sustainable fishing methods. However I really have very limited time to read upon all the publications out there. Furthermore, industry interest groups have quickly jumped into the foray and created their own statistics. Innocent-sounding organizations have been created to reach consumers with their hidden marketing messages.

So facing a large amount of unfiltered information, what’s a consumer to do? You can often find out where the information comes from, if you are persistent. Google and your tenacity do wonders. A couple of days ago a gentleman called me a liar and thought I should go to jail for my blog entry while fiercely defending salmon farming. Well a few minutes of Google search led me to an organization named Salmon Of The Americas (SOTA) which was founded by members of Chilean, Canadian, and U.S. salmon farming industries. It so happens that the chair person of SOTA shares the same name as our friend. So here is my “dilemma”: trust information from NY Times, Washington Post, NRDC, or a person from SOTA? Hmmm.

When information at large is overwhelming, I rely on a few trusted organizations to provide me with sustainable seafood guide. Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of them. You can download a wallet-sized regional guide and take with you to stores and restaurants. For example, for the west coast, in the best choice category, you will find U.S. farmed tilapia, both U.S. farmed and wild-caught striped bass, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon, among others. The Avoid list includes Orange Roughy, imported swordfish, Bluefin tuna, and farmed salmon. The guide is updated regularly.

With limited variations, Blue Ocean Institution confirms Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood guide. On Blue Ocean’s website, you can find very detailed scorecard for various fish, such as the criteria they use and how they score the fish for each criteria. Pick a fish, the site will tell you in great detail how it is caught or farmed, what food is fed to the fish if farmed, how it impacts the fish stock in the ocean or the environment, why they get a score of 0.75, and etc.

Additionally National Resource Defense Council presents great recipes for sustainable seafood. I have tried a couple and they were even good enough for my non-fish loving children. If you are interested in ocean conservation in general, a good place to start is Seaweb.

With the handy-dandy sustainable seafood guide at hand, I don’t need to comb through the web to find reliable information. We eat fish for its nutritional value and for its great taste. At the same time it also feels great to know that we are not depriving the future generation or destroying the environment in the ocean or on the land.

CindyW at Organicpicks

Related Post:
Eat sustainably from the ocean

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