This post was originally published by Blue Tomorrow. Reprinted with permission.
Farmed or wild? If you’re like me, choosing fish at the market opens a whirlpool of questions and choices. You check the price, the country of origin, maybe a label promising something something “sustainability.” Ian Urbina’s excellent article in a recent edition of The New York Times Magazine asks us to go further: What did your fish eat? And who paid the price for putting it on your plate?
I know, you could go crazy tracing the origin of everything you buy — your marshmallow-soled running shoes, your bamboo bedsheets, that “Dolly Parton in Space” meme you asked Claude to make. But seafood — particularly farmed fish — is a compelling case.
According to the article:
Those of us who have recently eaten farm-raised seafood are participating in a developing environmental crisis.
Urbina is taking us to a dark place. In this essay, I want to acknowledge that and suggest how we can improve things.
Urbina and his colleagues at The Outlaw Ocean Project follow a supply chain that turns wild fish into fishmeal and oil, feeds those ingredients to farmed seafood, and delivers the finished products to distant markets. In West Africa, they report, fish that could feed local villages go instead into the mouths of commercially grown fish. Their investigation documents pollution, dangerous working conditions, and threats to marine wildlife along the way. The farmed fish industry has enormous impacts on global ecosystems.
Urbina writes:
At some Norwegian fish farms, a single salmon can eat anywhere from two to more than five times its weight in wild-caught fish. Altogether, the country’s fish farms produce three times as much waste in a year as the country’s 5.6 million residents flush down their toilets, according to a recent report from the Sunstone Institute, a global data science organization. The farms’ waste, which consists of salmon feces, rotting carcasses and uneaten feed, mostly cascades to the coastal seafloor, forming a noxious sludge that smothers marine life.
Not all farmed seafood is that bad. Urbina acknowledges that oysters, mussels, and clams generally require no manufactured feed and that some other farming systems offer benefits in food access and the management of greenhouse-gases.
For me, Urbina’s investigation points to three prescriptions that could work well in the United States. That would be big. The United States is the world’s largest seafood importer by value, accounting for about 15 percent of global imports. Roughly half of that is farmed seafood.
First, major importers and sellers should be required to investigate the marine ingredients used to feed their seafood. They should identify feed suppliers, the factories that process fish into meal and oil, and the fisheries supplying those factories, with vessel information where applicable. They should check those records against independent evidence and investigate warning signs. Companies should have to address abuses they uncover and face meaningful penalties for falsifying records or failing to perform required checks.
I’m not re-inventing the paddlewheel. NOAA already administers a seafood import program that requires some harvest-to-entry information. My recommendation just expands the information required. Congress should make this change and provide the resources to enforce it.
Second, institutions buying seafood should put their purchasing power behind these expectations. Universities, hospitals, government agencies, and other large customers should require sourcing documentation, access for independent verification, and correction of violations as conditions of their contracts. Serious or unresolved breaches should expose suppliers to suspension or termination.
Third, the government and consumers should demand better labeling. The federal government should require labels on farmed fish, indicating what they were fed. In addition, products containing significant amounts of fishmeal or fish oils — like pet food and dietary supplements — should be labeled as such, with information about the type of fish and its origin.
If the government demurs, consumers should demand third-party certification from credible organizations that label products as free from certain sources of fishmeal or fish oil. Again, this is not a new idea. Third-party certification is already available for many products, including those free of palm oil and unsustainably grown hardwoods.
In the meantime, there are still things people like you and me can do. At the counter, we can lean into mussels and oysters and ask what evidence supports a seller’s sustainability claims. It’s true, your grocer might not know. But just asking can push questions up the chain.
In the end, it shouldn’t be our job to investigate every fillet that slides onto our plate. That’s what government and responsible businesses are for. But as citizens of a global economy, it is our job to demand change.
Banner image courtesy of the author.
