After all that, it's a bit disappointing you didn't specify which kind of fish in the recipes.

For instance, tuna. Some types of tuna are listed as "avoid" at Seafood Watch. And Oceans Alive has posted health alerts--especially for children--on tuna because of mercury.

What kind of salmon? Seafood Watch advises "avoid" not only Atlantic salmon but farmed chinook salmon. I wouldn't buy farmed salmon at all. The only choice remaining would be wild-caught salmon, and preferably Coho, Sockeye or King Salmon from Alaska.

You're right. It's a big headache.

The Slow Cook

As an aquatic scientist living in Alaska, I vehemently disagree with CyberBrook's sweeping generalizations about whether it's OK to eat fish.  I am not a vegetarian.  But neither do I think eating "bush meat" is a good thing, though I note most critics of this practice are not indigenous people looking for protein for their families in some of the world's most impoverished countries.

When you kill a chimpanzee or forest ungulate in the prime of its life, you destroy that individual's ability to propagate. However, when I eat a wild Alaska Sockeye, caught on its spawning run, I destroy only a single individual's reproductive potential out of a local spawning population of thousands of fish.  Since productivity in most rivers is limited by spawning habitat rather than spawning returns, as long as there are enough other adult Sockeye making it up the river, my harvest has no effect on productivity.  Alaska has a well-managed fishery and few if any obstacles to migration, unlike the N. Atlantic, site of first the Atlantic salmon crash (due in part to dams) and then the Cod and Haddock crash (due to overfishing) that occured while I was at a Nova Scotian grad school.

Maybe CyberBrook and other readers don't know this, but Pacific salmon die soon after spawning.  So the salmon I catch would be dead within a week or too anyway, very likely without spawning successfully.  Meanwhile, many of the alternative foods CyberBrook suggests I eat to get my Omega 3s etc. are grown thousands of miles from AK, and consume massive amount of fossil fuels in their cultivation and transport.  In contrast the nearest salmon-bearing stream is 1/4 mile from where I sit in a downtown Anchorage office building.  I can walk there on my lunch hour.

I will stick to Alaska salmon and halibut -- poor CyberBrook doesn't know what s/he is missing!

A FREE seafood-mercury calculator that allows you to estimate your personal mercury level based on your seafood eating habits is available at:

 www.GotMercury.org

Hi. The Slow Cook asked why I didn't specify which salmon and tuna to use in the recipes. In the article, I recommend that people stick with Wild Alaskan salmon and Skipjack tuna from Hawaii and California. I  based this recommendation on both health and environmental info culled from the Oceans Alice website as well as a few other sources. This information is updated as necessary, so it's worth looking at now and then to see if there have been any changes regarding your favorite kinds of fish.  I am assuming that most readers can take the information they glean from the article and apply it to the recipes.

Well, how can it be eco-conscious when it comes from China? I just found out that the shrimp sold at my local market comes from China. And you know there is a review taking place on the safety of seafood imported from China. I was so sad when I found this out becuase I love shrimp. I asked around and was told that locally farmed/raised shrimp taste really bad. Any news?

Ms. Orr cites an article on the PCR website that essentially states that it's bad to eat fish that have toxins in them. Well, yes. It is. That's why it's helpful to have lists that show which species are least likely to contain these toxins. This article ends by stating that it's best to avoid all animal products, which is quite a leap and quite telling.

The next article she cites states that fish may not have the heart-healthy benefits that most health professionals believe they do. I will certainly be following this -- similar questions have been raised in the past few years about the cardiac benefits of hormone therapy with the result that hormone therapy is no longer prescribed specifically for cardiac health reasons alone -- but in the meantime I will rely on the current opinion of the majority of health professionals.

Many of the readers who have written in are opposed to eating meat and fish, and that's fine. I completely support them in their decision to become vegans and vegetarians and I encourage them to express their opinion. I think that choosing to follow a vegan or vegetarian diet is great.

There are some people who are going to continue to eat fish, however, and they want to do so in the most environmentally-friendly way that they can. It's important that information about how to try to do that be available to them. If vegetarians who don't want anyone to eat fish write in and say that all fish are equally damaging to the environment to consume, then the people who still plan to eat fish might not think that it's worth taking the time and effort to try to eat the fish whose harvesting is least damaging to the fish stocks and the environment. Since people who currently plan to keep eating fish is a large group, I feel that I can have the greatest environmental impact by engaging them in issues involving the best way to do that. If I were to write only for vegans and vegetarians, I'd be "preaching to the choir" and wouldn't have the chance to change anyone's dietary behavior since they have already decided not to buy fish and meat. So, in order to have the greatest impact from an environmental standpoint, I have to address the folks who will be going out and buying fish but who are willing to make an effort to think about what they're buying and to change their buying patterns based on the best environmental information available.

In short, if you are a vegan or vegetarian who wants everyone to stop eating meat and fish, feel free to say so. But to claim that all fish are the same from an environmental or health standpoint isn't accurate. Not only does such a statement not strengthen an argument for vegetarianism, but it ultimately doesn't serve the environment well either.

hi..i am somewhat gobsmacked that grist...a supposed enviro-rag..

is promoting the best way to cook/eat other sentient beings..

what 'next..?..

best cuts of veal..and how to slow-cook them..?

(w.t.f. are you thinking..!.)

vegankiwiguy

Well done, CyberBrook.  And well done, all others who have written, protesting the thoughtless, insensitive slaughter of fish, whether by hook or by net.

Let us proceed step by step, Philu.  Grist is rather backwards, and needs some time to catch up.  Let us let them do what they are ready to do; meanwhile, let us let them know where they should be headed.

This is the second time in as many weeks that Grist has published a piece advocating eating dead animals. I am starting to think that I should stop subscribing and getting my environmental news elsewhere.

Seriously, Grist should know better. Trying to justify eating fish (or any other animal) is simply asinine. Do the people at Grist care about our planet at all? If so, they are extremely misinformed.

Hey folks, please go to fishwise.org and see what you can do to convince your local retailer (even Whole Foods!) to use their program. Give the people who provide seafood for us the tools to find the most sustainable fish available. And until you are positive that it's sustainable, don't buy shrimp!