Taking a dive into the murky future of extracting food from the troubled sea 2

In my work on food and agriculture, I’ve focused nearly 100 percent on land-based issues. But the earth’s vast and gaping oceans have always been a major source for human nutrition—and will be only more so as population grows over the next decades. No one who writes on intersections between food and ecology can ignore the seas. I need to educate myself.

With that in mind, I’m currently attending the Seafood Summit, a confab sponsored by a combination of NGOs (e.g., Marine Stewardship Council), foundations (e.g., Packard), and corporate interests (e.g., Darden, which owns Red Lobster and other restaurant chains).

The hottest topic here is aquaculture—a truly new practice with a history of around 50 years, compared with agriculture’s 10,000-year track record. The question isn’t whether aquaculture will continue to grow explosively over the next decades; the question is whether it will mimic the blunders of land-based industrial agriculture, or move in more sustainable directions.

Look for my seafood-ish posts over the next couple of days.

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