By: Tom Kearney | Feb 24, 2010 | #
Sustainable Fish?
I feel like a lot of people have this notion that there is something inherently wholesome about eating fish. Just the sheer act of ordering fish off of a restaurant menu or going to a fish market and buying it seems like an act of good faith, or at least good intention. The reality though is that the crisis in aquaculture is worse than anything I can think of in agriculture or factory meat farming. Unless you’re equipped to know what’s going on, it’s a minefield. Sustainable seafood choices also seems to be the most overlooked component of restaurant menus. Even those restaurants that are attempting to cook seasonally or locally will still feature Wild Striped Bass or Cod. While wild caught bass is a great ecological choice, you may be surprised to find out that the Environmental Defense Fund does not recommend you eat it because of elevated levels of mercury and PCB’s. Similarly cod seems like a fairly common menu item, but the fact is that it is severely overfished, its population is in massive decline and the trawling methods used to catch it damage the ocean floor’s marine habitat. These are just two examples. There is a bright side…you can make sustainable choices using guides from The Monterey Bay Aquarium and The Environmental Defense Fund.I also like the food journalist Barry Estabrook’s intense investigative pieces on sustainability on The Atlantic’s online food section.
Here’s a nifty link to an iphone app for the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Guide