Sustainable Seafood
Sustainable seafood is one of the littlest understood aspects of global foodways. The problem is not only that there are so many fish, fisheries, and methods of fishing, but so many different opinions about what sustainable seafood is. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s famous guidelines may differ from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s FishWatch, which may differ from what your local fisherman has to say from personal experience.
What everybody agrees on is this: the ocean is a finite resource. Right now, some 85% of the world’s fisheries are being worked beyond a sustainable limit. Some say that certain fish, like the bluefin tuna, so popular in sushi, will be extinct within decades.
There are two kinds of seafood: wild and farmed. Both can be sustainable or otherwise.
Wild seafood is marine life fished out of the earth’s bodies of water, whether oceans, lakes, or streams. Some fish, like bluefin tuna, can only be fished from the wild.
Farmed seafood comes from man-made environments, or man-made contraptions placed in natural environments. They are often called fish farms, and the process of raising seafood on fish farms is called aquaculture. There are many kinds of aquaculture. Some bigger fish, like salmon, can be farmed in vast net pens in the open ocean. Other fish, like catfish, call for more narrow runs that can be managed on solid land.
The quality of aquacultural systems varies about as widely as the systems themselves. Some fish farming operations are highly sophisticated ecological loops, in which the outputs of some life (like oysters) are inputs for other life (like finfish). But some fish farms prioritize short term production over the long-term health of riverbeds; and some countries, like those of Southeast Asia, have many farms that churn out fish en masse at the expense of sustainability and quality.
Beyond wild versus farmed, the species of fish is a determinant of seafood sustainability.
Some fish species have been severely overfished and should not be consumed. Orange roughy is one. Though it often appears on menus, Chilean sea bass is another fish whose population has dwindled to dangerously low levels.
Confounding the issue of seafood sustainability is that some fish may be sustainable from some fisheries, but unsustainable from others. Halibut should be avoided when fished out of the Atlantic. However, Halibut fished out of Alaskan waters is a more sustainable choice.
The consequences of overfishing wild stocks are dire. The Atlantic salmon, a once-plentiful species, has been fished to virtual extinction in the wild. Today, just about all Atlantic salmon are farmed. You have to go to the Pacific for wild salmon.
In the Pacific, the picture is different. Alaska has intelligently regulated its salmon fishing seasons, carefully monitoring hatching and mating runs to regulate populations. This is to keep wild stocks of prized species, like King and Sockeye, pristine. As a result, wild salmon can be a highly sustainable fish.
In addition to how raised, where raised, and fish species, the question of how fish is caught will determine its sustainability.
Some methods of fishing destroy marine ecosystems. When fishermen employ dredging — dragging nets on the ocean floor — they disrupt reefs and plant life. When fishermen trawl — pull cone-shaped nets behind them — they end up with abundant bycatch: fish they don’t want, which end up wasted.
More sustainable methods of fishing include longlining (running a single multi-mile line with many hooks from a boat), simple hook and line fishing, harpooning, and trapping.
Sustainable seafood is a complex issue. Luckily, there are many entities that have done the research for you and have plenty of free resources. The two mentioned here in earlier paragraphs are great resources So, too, is the Marine Stewardship Council, which puts blue and white stickers on fish to indicate its approval — and the fish’s sustainability.
QWerks supports sustainable fishing and food production techniques and the QWerks software helps companies decrease their carbon footprint by eliminating paper. Find out how QWerks can help your business today.
