Turning the Tides on Unsustainable Eating
Coral reefs are dying, and fish are disappearing. The current of devastation begins in our everyday lives, including the food on our plates.
I’ve visited the Big Island of Hawaii, where my parents now live, almost annually for more than a decade. My first few years snorkeling at Honaunau Bay, the multicolored coral reef teemed with fish and sea turtles. Now, year after year, this underwater utopia has become more muted; the once vibrant coral is dull. The invisible current of change that ends in the sea begins not just with the gasoline in our cars and the water in our showers, but also the food on our plates.
This year, as we tread into World Oceans Day, however, the tides may be turning for our oceans and the sea creatures who call it home. An octopus just won an Oscar, and a shocking, controversial film on the global fishing industry has topped Netflix’s charts. For better or worse, mainstream America is finally contemplating sea life — and our role in its destruction or survival.
Meanwhile, Good Housekeeping asked readers about their biggest priorities for a more sustainable world. Unsurprisingly, the top two responses were climate change and plastic pollution. Public concern about plastic intensified after the now-infamous video of a sea turtle with a straw embedded in his nostril went viral. The resulting intense public campaigning by environmental groups for plastic straw bans prompted even giants like Starbucks to take action.
Yet straws constitute only about 0.025 percent of the plastic in our oceans. The aforementioned documentary Seaspiracy shines a light on a much bigger, yet mostly overlooked, plastic nemesis lurking in the seas: fishing nets.* “Nets and lines can pose a threat to wildlife for years or decades, ensnaring everything from small fish and crustaceans to endangered turtles, seabirds and even whales,” says Greenpeace.
The dangers of industrial fishing to non-target wildlife like dolphins and whales doesn’t begin once this equipment is discarded, though. According to World Wildlife Fund, massive nets indiscriminately scoop up 38 million tons of non-target wildlife, called “bycatch,” annually, a number so great that we can’t quantify all of the individual animals. It’s estimated that each year 300 thousand cetaceans and an equal number of seabirds fall victim to fishing nets, along with a quarter million sea turtles.
As fish populations dwindle in many under-managed, over-exploited fisheries, we supplement industrial fishing operations with intensive fish farms to satiate our seafood appetite — with disastrous results. Jonathan Safran Foer writes in his book Eating Animals:
A major source of suffering for salmon and other farmed fish is the abundant presence of sea lice, which thrive in the filthy water. … A single salmon farm generates swarming clouds of sea lice in numbers 30,000 times higher than naturally occur. The fish that survive these conditions (a 10% to 30% death rate is seen as good by many in the salmon industry) are likely to be starved for seven to 10 days to diminish their bodily waste during transport to slaughter.
But seafood is hardly the end of this turbulent story. Back to snorkeling off the Hawaiian coast: the coral reefs have faded almost before my eyes through a phenomenon called coral bleaching. This occurs when, in response to a stressor like temperature rise, corals release their symbiotic algae that provide them with nutrients. Honaunau Bay now sits in the middle of a giant red zone on NOAA’s map of coral bleaching in Hawaii. Much like the clearcutting of a rainforest, if the coral can’t recover and dies off, there will be resounding, potentially irreparable loss of surrounding wildlife.
Global climate change is, therefore, fueling ocean devastation, and a prime culprit is on our plates — not only salmon, but steak, too. Meat and dairy spew out greenhouse gases by the millions of tons: if cows were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter. And according to the journal Science, meat, aquaculture, dairy, and eggs contribute about 57 percent of food’s greenhouse gas emissions but only provide 18 percent of our calories.
The problem lies not in the small fishers or farmers; for the past half-century, they have been displaced by a massive profit-driven machine both on land and at sea. According to the Oceanic Preservation Society, “Commercial fisheries are … seeking to harvest more fish from declining stocks with even bigger boats and contributing to human rights abuses. Large-scale commercial fisheries are the floating factory farms of the sea.”
For decades, the factory farms dominating our food system have fed us a harmful default: meat at every meal. Fortunately, however, millions are already ushering in a more resilient and sustainable new normal by exploring ocean-friendly, plant-centric foods from innovators like Good Catch, or pledging to cut back on fish.
A current of change is certainly underway, but we need our leaders to spearhead a full transformation. Yet the United Nations, the very entity that promulgates World Oceans Day every June, has come under fire by a consortium of environmental and consumer protection advocates for allowing its own food and environment conferences to “be nothing but a tool for further corporate predation on the people and natural systems.”
As advocates, then, we collectively play perhaps the most critically important role in modeling and pushing for this tidal wave of sustainable eating. Recently, my organization, Better Food Foundation, published our analysis of plant-forward internal food policies in the environmental space. While we found dozens of trailblazers like the Oceanic Preservation Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Harvard’s Office for Sustainability, most of the country’s largest environmental protection organizations were notably absent from the list. So too, was nearly every single ocean protection organization.
Transforming attitudes about meat-eating can be hard, so it’s no surprise that many ocean advocates are wary about facing stigma and pushback associated with traditional dietary change campaigns. That’s where a subtle but powerful menu strategy using plant-based defaults can be helpful. Simply swapping in plants as the default menu option, while giving people the choice to opt in to meals with animal products, is enormously effective because, like schooling fish, we are social creatures who don’t want to swim too far outside the pack. Through a simple behavioral “nudge,” this approach can reshape what we, the public, think of as normal.
Case studies find that plant-based nudges can increase the selection of the plant-based options by up to 80 percentage points, all without sacrificing diner choice. And in terms of the climate impact, we did the math: switching 1,000 meals to what we call “DefaultVeg” saves 1,600 kg CO2eq, an amount of pollution equivalent to driving an average passenger vehicle 4,140.9 miles — further than Los Angeles to Minneapolis and back.
A trickle of ocean protectors have begun embracing plant-based foods as the new default, sending a positive message to conscious citizens that plant protein is a key part of a healthier, safer future. Now let’s open the floodgates and build the movement for an inclusive, resilient, and ocean-friendly food system.
*Seaspiracy accurately notes that nearly half of the plastic floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing ropes, but the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not particularly representative of plastic ocean pollution generally. For example, most microplastics from sources like plastic bags do not float. Other research has estimated fishing gear to comprise up to about 10 percent of ocean plastics globally, still a much greater figure than plastic straws.
Laura Lee Cascada has a master’s degree in environmental policy from Johns Hopkins University and is the Campaigns Director at the Better Food Foundation.
