Tagged with Sustainable Seafood 
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A disturbing fish tale
‘The End of the Line’ is a compelling indictment of industrial fishing 2
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago
"The End of the Line" does for the fish what Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" did for the climate: scare the pants of the viewer. The documentary deftly makes the case that industrial exploitation of the world's fish stocks will result in the end of seafood by 2048, if not sooner, and that some species may already be in collapse.
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Ask Umbra’s video advice on sustainable seafood 2
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago -
Water out of fish
Why the foodie press needs to do better work on seafood 0
Posted 8 months agoI recently finished Taras Grescoe's wonderful, vitally important book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood. Everyone who loves seafood and would prefer to be able to enjoy it in 20 years must read it.
Basic message: overfishing, pollution, climate change, and abusive aquaculture practices threaten to turn the oceans into vast pools of jellyfish, seaweed, slime and little else, within our lifetimes -- unless we change things fast.
And changing things fast means being hyper-conscious about what seafood we eat. For Grescoe, that means focusing mainly on so-called "trash" fish -- utterly delicious, low-on-the-food-chain stuff like anchovies and sardines. These magnificent creatures now get harvested en masse, to be ground into meal and oil to feed the ravenous maw of the aquaculture industry and its flavorless "salmon," "shrimp," etc.
Other good choices are farmed oysters and stuff that you know comes from artisanal fishermen. It turns out that small-scale fishermen who supply their nearby communities tend to be much better stewards of the seas than the vast industrial fleets that dominate fisheries.
Of course, relying on individual consumer choice to save the globe's fisheries is likely futile. The problems are so dire and immediate that we need concerted, global governmental intervention, as Grescoe makes clear in his conclusion.
Until that happens, there's an urgent need to educate the public about the dismal state of the oceans. The effort starts with food journalists -- people who have a direct impact on the public imagination about fish.
It seems to me that food journalists have generally failed at this task. I see examples all the time of foodie articles blithely extolling the culinary virtues of this or that fish species, without considering the impact of consuming them.
In an extremely evocative piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, NYT culture editor (and former food-section editor) Sam Sifton goes in search of the perfect homemade fish taco. The piece certainly isn't the most egregious example of ocean-blithe foodiness I've ever seen. But given Sifton's position, he should do better -- so I'll take him to task.
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