Ocean Grove Record

The Nature Grove

Nature Grove Meets the Dinner Plate

by Mike Au Natural

I have a bad habit of sharing too much information when it comes to dining with friends or family. I don’t mean sharing personal information or gossip, but information which tends to make the listener just as uneasy. Information which I fear may be resulting in fewer dinner invitations for myself. I’m talking about information pertaining to the environmental costs associated with your meal selection.

Admit it, many of us really don’t give a lot of thought into what we use to fuel our bodies with. Sure, we may count carbs, eat more protein, try to eat our greens, and avoid fried food, but, do you REALLY think about the fish you order in restaurant, apart from whether or not it tastes good? Do you think about what species it is, what it ate, where it lived, or how it got from the sea to your supper dish? Most people don’t, and therein lies the problem.

There are a variety of reasons why you should avoid eating certain seafoods. First, several types of fish such as swordfish, snapper, roughy, and tuna may have elevated levels of mercury or other contaminants within them. Second, several species of fish have been overfished.

Overfished means that the fish are being consumed faster than they can reproduce. Some species of fish are not capable of reproduction until they’ve reach an age of over 10 or more years. Unfortunately, demand for them causes them to be fished prior to them reaching that critical age, leaving fewer and fewer adults capable of reproducing.

Another issue is the way in which the fish are caught. Several methods of fishing can be extremely damaging to ocean habitats and the species within them. For instance, longlining is one fishing method whereby long lines with baited hooks are left to drift in the sea, catching anything and everything that takes their bait. Quite often rather than fish getting hooked, its seabirds such as endangered albatrosses which get hooked and subsequently die. This is called “bycatch”, the unintentional capture of one animal while pursuing another.

It was a major problem with tuna fisheries in the past, whereby dolphins (a.k.a. Flipper’s cousins) were caught and killed – this is still a problem in many unregulated waters around the world. Here’s an alarming bycatch statistic for you: shrimp trawls have the lowest ratio of desired target catch (shrimp) to unwanted bycatch (everything else) – up to 15 pounds of marine life may be captured, killed and discarded for every one pound of shrimp.

Consider the Chilean Seabass, a staple of many restaurants in the area, in assessing the environmental costs in ordering it for dinner. (1) it frequently has high levels of mercury or other contaminants; (2) it is a slow-growing fish which reproduces late in life and is therefore susceptible to overfishing; (3) it is caught through bottom trawling or longlining, both destructive to species and habitat; (4) it is fished in Antarctic waters (consider the fuel costs associated with getting that fish from Antarctica to your dinner plate). What’s a fish lover to do? There are better alternatives.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a program called Seafood Watch whereby they provides plenty of great information regarding the best and worst choices for fish consumption. In addition, they provide plenty of detail in how those decisions were reached, including details on various fishing methods.

Their website is: www.mbayaq.org. They have a nifty little card that you can slip into your wallet which lists the fish to avoid and the fish which would make great alternatives.

How about farmed fish? Well, some farmed fish is better than others. For instance, farmed tilapia and farmed catfish are excellent seafood selections. Both types of fish are freshwater fish which can be farmed in systems closed-off from wild populations and both can be fed vegetable products rather than other fish.

Farmed salmon is NOT a good choice because (1) they are often farmed in pens within the ocean where their wastes escape and potentially spread disease to wild populations; and (2) they are fed smaller fish, which requires more input than alternatives such as the tilapia are fed (it takes three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon).

So, let’s say you want to do the right thing. You go to a restaurant and see salmon on the menu. You pull-out your Seafood Watch card and see that farmed salmon is on the AVOID list while wild, Alaskan salmon is on the BEST CHOICES list.

A good restaurant can tell you where the fish they serve is from. If they don’t know where its from, you should think twice about eating there. Be persistent – I’ve sent many a waiter to ask the chef where the fish was caught - on one occasion, the waiter had the nerve to return and ask “what would you like to hear?” And don’t give-in to the argument, “what’s the difference if I order it, since the fish is dead already”. If you order the fish, you create a demand for that type of fish. The restaurant owner, seeing that the fish sells, will buy it again, supporting the market for the fishermen to fill. If the fish doesn’t sell, than the restaurant will not put it on the menu again.

I’ve decided not to preach to my dining companions any longer regarding the environmental costs behind their dining choices. So long as they don’t order veal and don’t ask for my opinion, I’ll keep my information to myself. However, as with anything, there are costs associated with the choices we make, some of the costs can be lowered by making more informed decisions. Besides breathing, eating is the most important thing we do each and every day. We should all just spend a little more time thinking about it.

Read Mike's previous column here,
and find links to all his columns