Now, overfishing is a very valid concern, but this article is just paragraph after paragraph of equivocation and accusatory language. Possibly (not actually, yet) overfished fish? Bad fish. Caught in a manner he dislikes? Bad fish! Nonvegetarian (srsly) farmed fish? BAD FISH! Doesn’t that make you feel bad, boing? Aren’t you ashamed yet?

Best part is the very last paragraph:
Bowman tells of a restaurant owner whom she was trying to convince to serve more sustainable seafood. “The guy would sell anything that came out of the water,” she says. He complained about the salmon restrictions and refused to remove shrimp from his menu. One night, his six-year-old daughter asked him, “Is the fish going to be here when I’m a big girl?”

He called the next day. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said to Bowman. “What do I need to do?”
Yeah, wow.

You can download pocket guides for your region and there are apps for your phone too.

As a note, the little grocery store around the corner from my house has nothing but the “avoid” fish for sale in the seafood department.

However, commercial fishing boats from outside the US trawl, longline and net the international waters of the Georges Bank like nobody’s business, staying out for months at a time, packing it all in the hold and heading home. There is literally nothing that can be done about it, as these are international waters and these are other nations.

In the end, I do my part. I look for sustainable fish, I have stopped eating the cod and tuna I love and encourage others to do the same. But while I have a warm and fuzzy feeling it makes me sad that it’s all for naught and they’ll be gone by the time my kid is my age anyway.

An example of this would be red meat- we started eating a LOT more red meat after WWII, and then since the late 70′s, we’ve been eating less and less. Farmers simply adjusted their numbers to match the demand- there were no great steak landfills or mass-chucking of burgers- it was a gradual trend brought about as people realized cholesterol and fat were not good for them, and one-by-one reduced their beef intake.

I don’t know if farm-raised fish can not be raised sustainably overall- I would guess it depends on what fish and how it’s done… but often, the farm raised fish are grown by feeding them smaller fish, which have to be shipped in. So rather than having fish swim around in the wild like they’re made to do, catching whatever they find, we have oil-powered machines transporting large quantities of other fish that someone had to work at catching just to fatten up the fish that are popular… like shrimp farms in Thailand, for example. It’s a wasteful, illogical way to do it and it can’t last in the long run. Which doesn’t mean there might not be efficient ways to do it, either- but I think most of them right now aren’t like that.

The reason farmed salmon is on the bad list is due to the way it’s farmed. You have to put a salmon farm in an existing river, and all the effluvia from the farm goes straight into the river. That’s really bad for the river, obviously. Also, since the salmon are in a very tight space, they’re vulnerable to infection, which means they have to get antibiotics – and again, all those antibiotics as well as any parasites get flushed into the river and impact the native species. Studies have shown that wild populations are severely impacted when a salmon farm is introduced.

Okay! So no farmed salmon. What about farmed other stuff? The general rule is that if it’s lower on the food chain, the more likely it is that the farm is a sustainable choice. Farmed catfish, for instance, are a great choice. The reasoning here is that you don’t have to go out and catch food for the fish you’re farming. As the article points out, it generally takes four pounds of harvested fish to grow one pound of farmed fish, so if you can stay away from fish that depend on meat, you’re much better off. Farmed mussels are also a good choice – they are filter feeders, so they don’t require meat.

The other general rule is that US-caught or farmed is the best choice. The US has stricter regulations on how the fish can be caught or farmed, and as a result the fish is much more sustainable. There are exceptions (like mussels, which Seafood Watch says are fine from most places), but in general it’s best to avoid imported fish.

As the the question of farm-raised fish, there’s the waste problem already mentioned, but also the problem that you have to feed most fish well over a pound of other fish to get a pound of the fish you’re farming. So your farm-raised salmon is the result of many pounds of other fish that have almost certainly been unsustainably fished. (Since no one bothers to ask the restaurant “ah, but was the fish feed sustainably caught, there’s no incentive to use sustainable fishing methods to get the feed.)

I should start getting more into Sicilian cooking. My only sardine recipe is a delicious Pasta con le Sarde, with fennel, raisins and saffron. Super delicious, but also not nearly as easy as throwing a side of salmon in a hot pan for a minute.

I fear that if the market for, say sharks, drops (as it should!) that no fewer of them would be illegally (or unintentionally) caught, but that they will just be dead anyway and tossed overboard before the boat returns to shore, because the bad guys know nobody will buy them.

And while I don’t imagine warehouses of dead fish, or big meat landfills (fish sticks, omega-3 pills,and cat food have to come from somewhere, don’t they?) it just seems a little off that my cat might be eating fine endangered tuna in his Meow Mix but I can’t buy it at the market due to moral reservations. Of course, I come from a long line of frugal folks who would roast up all sorts of wild game if they happened upon it, but wouldn’t really put venison on a shopping list.

The bits in the original article about misleading menu notes and questionable sourcing (whilst charging the premium greenwashed prices) are the most unnerving. For an avid label-reader and local sourcing nerd, it’s kind of mindblowing. I’m paying extra for you to tell me that info. I could pay less for something responsibly done but not divulged as such, or I could pay you double to lie to my face. Not cool. Fine those crooks. I can’t afford to grow, catch, or farm everything myself. I trade my time and effort at work for a universal bargaining currency so that I can defer to ‘experts’ in those areas.

I would like to teach the whole world to go out to eat, but leave their expectations at home. Stop ordering all-you-can-eat shrimp, numnuts!!

If you’d bother to read the article you’d see that far from telling you to run off to Whole Foods for a guilt-free lifestyle, the guys shows how Whole Foods is actually part of the problem. I’m not sure if you’re rationalizing your unhealthy lifestyle or resent anyone who sounds like an authority on something.

I don’t know if the answer really is expensive Californian restaurants and the few people holding their good fish/bad fish papers at the Whole Foods counter. That’s not going to cut down on the millions of cans of tunafish eaten every day in the US alone, or the millions of pounds of jumbo fried shrimp.

Are there any legislators working on bills to limit the amount of tuna, shrimp and salmon fished each year? I can’t think of anything else that would stem this time bomb.

The “bad” fish is already caught, there’s no hope to return it back to sea to swim around and tell alien abduction stories to its buddies. I get the mercury-level warning of big fish who eat lots of small fish having a higher concentration of that poisonous metal; that makes plenty of sense as to why you should want to avoid or limit them in your diet, but, it seems to me that at the consumer level, refusing to buy bad fish because of shady catching methods is just going to lead to a lot of rotten unsold fish.

Clearly, the target should be the fishing methods, not the fish that get caught. I can support wholesalers boycotting certain fishing company and telling them “not until you change your tactic,” but I feel like by the time it’s my option, the damage is done.

Also, what’s so bad about farm-raised fish? Not advocating, just not clear. Things I read seem to contradict.

The most interesting stuff was the “vegetarian trout” project, and the fact that 55% of American seafood is canned tuna, shrimp, and salmon. The latter 2 are already farmed extensively but unecologically, so the trick is to develop methods for them similar to the trout.

Jonny Hamachi