Conscious Choice: Think Like a Fish

Vote with Your Fish Sticks

Fish might not be fuzzy-wuzzy, but they still need our attention and care. Here’s how to make dinnertime decisions that minimize your impact on the marine environment, so that oceans — and the creatures living there — can keep doing what they do best.

Organic Seafood: A Full-Scale Controversy
USDA organic standards for both wild-caught and farmed fish are currently in the draft stages, but remain a controversial topic within the environmental community because of the uncontrolled nature of the oceans and environmental impacts of certain fish farming sectors. So for now, regard any fish marketed as “organic” dubiously.
In the absence of official USDA organic standards for seafood, the London-based non-profit Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) stepped forward in 1997 to begin investigating fishery practices — and informing consumers about which are easiest on the environment. The MSC seal is now the most trusted indicator that the wild-caught fish bearing it was harvested with care.

Getting on the Good List
A number of other organizations provide seafood consumers with that famously powerful tool: knowledge. Seafood Watch, a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, offers some of the best consumer information available about responsible seafood choices (see insert in this issue). Their seafood pocket guides, updated twice a year, distinguish between “best choice” seafood options, good alternatives and fish absolutely to avoid. Oceans Alive, a program of Environmental Defense, also offers a similarly helpful “Pocket Seafood Selector.”

A Few Rules of Thumb Fin
Stranded at the grocery store without your pocket seafood guide? Never fear — a few general rules will point you in the right direction. Remember:

• Steer clear of farmed salmon; it takes three pounds of wild-caught fish to raise one pound of farmed salmon. Usually raised in open cages, their waste is also an environmental hazard.

• Farmed mollusks, including oysters, clams and muscles, are generally pretty safe. They don’t require feed (they strain it from the water) and in some cases they actually improve water quality.

• Stick to U.S. shrimp, preferably wild-caught. Most of the shrimp you’ll encounter is imported from tropical countries where regulations are lax. Shrimp farms are often built by destroying sensitive habitats, such as coastal mangrove forests, and their wastewater is frequently discharged untreated.

Positive Reinforcement
A pat on the back can go a long way. When a restaurant you like makes the choice to offer environmentally friendly fish, be sure to mention how much you appreciate it. And when you don’t find it, don’t keep your disappointment a secret.

September 2007

Think Like a Fish

It’s time for conscious consumers to get sentimental about sushi

By Andi McDaniel

It would be ironic, given the well-earned success of the organic food movement in the last decade, if it was the oceans’ collapse that did us in. It was our concern for the Earth as a whole, after all, that caused us to rally for a more sustainable food system in the first place. And yet, while we’ve been “voting with our forks” for a healthier landscape, our shining seas — the other 70 percent of the planet — are sounding urgent alarms.

Consider the recent article in Wired, for instance, citing the chilling statistic that 96 percent of all seafood considered edible is endangered. Or the report in Science, published last November, which predicted the world’s seafood supply could collapse by 2048. Add to that coral bleaching, acidification, global warming and pollution, and there’s no shortage of proof that our oceans are in peril. As documentarian Julia Whitty writes in Mother Jones, “[T]he ocean, for which our planet should be named, is changing in every parameter, in all dimensions, in every way we know how to measure it.”

But you sure wouldn’t know that by standing on the shore. Unlike environmental problems on land, which manifest in unmistakably visible ways — from clear-cut forests to paved-over paradises — ocean issues aren’t easy to fathom. From above, an ocean in crisis looks a lot like a healthy ocean: beautiful, blue and impenetrably vast.

What’s more, as terra-bound beings, we can’t help but identify more closely with mammals than with our finned, scaled and shelled brethren under the sea. Put a cute cartoon cow on an organic milk carton, and we’ll happily pay the high premium. It’s slightly more difficult, however, to wax sentimental over swordfish. As Fen Montaigne put it, writing in National Geographic on the plight of tuna, “If the giant bluefin lived on land, its size, speed and epic migrations would ensure its legendary status…. But because it lives in the sea, its majesty — comparable to that of a lion — lies largely beyond comprehension.”

Beyond any other environmental hazard, it is our voracious appetite for seafood — and the industry that has risen to sate it — that poses the largest threat to the oceans. Comprehensible or not, it’s time to start making the same personal connections with what’s in our sushi as we’ve made with what comes from our CSA.

But that’s going to take confronting some fundamental differences between land and sea food. To begin with, traditionally, seafood is not grown or raised — it’s hunted. Catching tuna and harvesting tomatoes raise very different issues, the former, requiring attention to reproduction habits, migration patterns and habitat. Wild harvesting, and the sophisticated technology developed to practice it further and further off- shore, often leads to habitat destruction, overfishing and innumerable creatures accidentally snared and discarded (called “bycatch”).

Despite enthusiastic claims to the contrary, fish farming — which currently supplies roughly half of the U.S. seafood market — is hardly a miracle alternative. Many open sea aquaculture farms pollute surrounding water with concentrated fish waste. Inland farms often require harvesting enormous amounts of wild fish for feed; consider that it takes three pounds of wild-caught feeder fish to raise one pound of farmed salmon. Other aquaculture efforts contaminate waterways with antibiotics used to treat the densely confined fish. Farmed shrimp, the most highly consumed seafood product in the United States, is one of the leading causes of mangrove forest destruction in tropical countries worldwide.

As shoppers get hip to seafood’s dark side, it’s opened the floodgates for a bevy of conscious-consumer-friendly seafood marketing utilizing buzzwords like “natural,” “eco-friendly” and “wild-caught” — to varying levels of accuracy. Consumer Reports made waves last summer with an investigation finding that most filets marketed as “wild-caught” in the off-season months of October through April were really fish-farmed fakers. And while organic standards for seafood are currently in draft form at the USDA, at least 18 national seafood purveyors are currently claiming the term on their packaging. Jennifer Dianto, manager of Seafood Watch, says that the process of regulating organic seafood today is where it was for organic meat and produce over a decade ago.

Given the dark secrets lurking behind the labels of so many seafood products, navigating that section of the grocery store can be daunting. And at the risk of driving the server crazy with inquiries as to the origins of the fish du jour, many of us just throw up our hands and order whatever is on the menu. But a growing number of organizations dedicated to helping consumers make responsible seafood choices are changing all that. Programs like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch provide clear guidelines about which fish to avoid, and which to enjoy guilt-free.

Their directives are already having an impact. Dianto lauds the recent accomplishments of advocates for more environmentally sound seafood management. “We’ve only been doing this for six years,” she says. “That’s a relatively short period of time for what has basically been a grassroots movement of consumers making some noise, demanding seafood from sustainable sources.” Dianto cites retail giant Wal-Mart’s recent commitment to sourcing seafood in its North American markets exclusively from fisheries certified by The Marine Stewardship Council, a decision that will send a message to fisheries everywhere about the most lucrative way to fish.

Even before the USDA comes out with its organic standards, the Marine Stewardship Council runs its own trustworthy certifying program for wild-caught seafood. (See sidebar for a complete rundown on purchasing sustainable seafood.) There are other ways to help protect and rehabilitate the oceans, too, such as advocating for marine reserves, which provide areas for fish to safely feed and breed.

As terrestrial creatures, it might not be as intuitive to consider the consequences of our choices on an underwater world we can’t even see, much less comprehend. But even if we can’t do it for the swordfish, we’d be wise to do it for ourselves.

As renowned marine explorer Sylvia Earle writes for Patagonia’s “Oceans as Wilderness” campaign, “The sea is the cornerstone of our life-support system: by taking care of it, we take care of ourselves; abuse it, and we put ourselves at risk.” The health of the sea is synonymous with the health of the Earth, and the health of all its inhabitants — whether they reside at the top of the food chain or the bottom.

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