The oceans are
in serious trouble, creating a tough question for consumers: Should I eat wild
fish, farmed fish, or no fish at all? The author, a longtime student of marine
environments, dove into an amazing new world of ethical harvesters, renegade
farmers, and problem-solving scientists. The result: your guide to sustainably
enjoying nature's finest source of protein.
A rainbow trout
raised on a vegan diet.
I contemplated
the simple sandwich on the plate in front of me: a beautiful slab of glistening
rainbow trout, crisp lettuce, and a freshly baked French roll. The trout skin
was lightly seared and seasoned. The pinkish meat was firm and toothsome. I
genuflected briefly, then two-fisted the thing and took a big bite. A slightly
smoky, sweet flavor gave my taste buds a sensation long denied. I chased it
with a slug of Fort Point ale. Soon, both fish sandwich and beer were gone. I
am a vegan, but I was untroubled. Eating the trout seemed like the right thing
to do.
The journey to
that sandwich began a few months earlier with a question from a friend who
wants to eat sustainably: What fish can I eat? My response was the same one I
have given for years: You should eat no fish at all.
I haven’t always
felt this way. I grew up on the East Coast, spent a lot of time on the Atlantic
Ocean, and ate more than my share of salmon, tuna, crabs, scallops, and
whatever other seafood was on offer. But a few years ago, as I began to write
extensively about the relationship between humans and animals, especially the
lives of marine mammals in captivity, my thinking changed. What we eat affects
the health of the planet as much, if not more, than what kind of car we drive
or where we set the thermostat. The more I learned, the more I came to believe
that the single most powerful choice an individual can make is to stop eating
animal protein. So, in 2010, I became a vegetarian. After about a year,
realizing I could manage without cream in my coffee and eggs for breakfast, I
took the next step and went vegan.
I didn’t
evangelize about it. I made my choice; others could make theirs. But I noticed
that when I was asked about my reasons, there always seemed to be special
interest in the question of fish, which even the vegetarian-inclined still want
to eat. Setting aside my vegan concerns about fish welfare—laugh if you like,
but then go watch a beautiful, fighting-mad bluefin tuna being gaffed on
YouTube—anyone who has been paying attention knows a dispiriting truth: wild
fish are being decimated by the world’s increasingly teched-out,
4.7-million-vessel fishing fleet. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates
that 90 percent of marine fish stocks are either fully exploited or
overexploited. Meanwhile, fish farming, with its reputation for overcrowding
and antibiotic-laced, fecal-polluting practices, doesn’t sound like a very
appealing solution. And there appears to be no shortage of crooks and liars,
from fraudulent distributors to fact-twisting chefs and fishmongers, at just
about every link in the distribution chain. According to a recent Associated Press investigation, you
can’t even be sure your supermarket isn’t stocking seafood caught by fish
pirates in Indonesia, who kidnap and enslave impoverished Southeast Asians to
work on their boats. The slaves work untenably long hours for little to no pay,
are locked up at night, and are often beaten if they don’t perform as told.
Where’s the argument for eating fish in all that?
But the
questions kept coming, and I knew my personal position didn’t provide realistic
or helpful advice. Seafood is an indispensable source of protein and omega-3
fatty acids—good for the heart and brain—on a planet whose population will need
a lot of protein as it swells toward a projected 9.3 billion people by 2050. My
friends and family and most of the world will continue to eat fish, and despite
all the seafood guides and journalism on the subject, people are more confused
than ever—about whether to eat wild or farmed, about which fish are healthier,
about the implications of fish consumption for the oceans.
“Just tell me
what fish I can eat,” my mother pleaded. So I set out to produce a better
answer, and what I learned surprised me. Not only might fish offer the best,
and least ecologically damaging, solution to global food insecurity in a
flesh-eating world, but some seafood is now produced so efficiently that even a
vegan might be tempted to rethink his absolutist vows.
I. Consider the
Source
The math is
simple. Global demand for fish is at about 158 million metric tons annually
(and growing), which is about twice the already worrisome 80 million
metric tons we take from the oceans. Against that unrelenting pressure, it
seems reckless to keep scarfing down wild fish.
But Kenny Belov,
a burly, high-energy 38-year-old who co-owns TwoXSea, a fish distributor on Fisherman’s Wharf in San
Francisco, is quick to disabuse me of the idea that wild fish should be
completely off the menu. Belov and his partner, Bill Foss, a cofounder of
Netscape, caught my attention by lobbing grenades at their own industry in a
probing San Francisco magazine story about seafood
sustainability (or lack thereof) a few years ago, and they have been outspoken
advocates for rethinking our approach to eating fish ever since. Most days,
Belov shows up at the TwoXSea warehouse at 3 A.M. to supervise the shipping of
1,500 to 2,000 pounds of seafood to top restaurants and stores in the Bay Area
and a few other cities—all of it sustainably caught. He is as obsessive and
conservative as they come in his views about whether any fish population is
healthy enough to be fished and whether the catch method damages other
populations or the ocean ecosystem.
Atlantic cod? “It’s
overfished and mostly caught by bottom trawling, which is like clear-cutting
the seafloor,” Belov scoffs. “I wish we would leave Atlantic cod alone. They
need more time to recover after what we did for so many generations.”
Ahi tuna?
“Almost all of it is caught on pelagic longlines, which are 40-plus miles of
floating line dangling a baited hook every three feet. Longlines catch
everything else in the habitat.” That’s called bycatch, a somewhat bloodless
term for a fishing method that indiscriminately hooks as many as 150,000 sea
turtles annually, along with tens of thousands of seabirds, whales, sharks,
dolphins, and porpoises.
The Alaskan
pollock so often used for fish fingers? “Caught by fishing vessels that are 100
to 200 feet long,” Belov says. “Their huge nets pull in lots of other species,
like squid and salmon.”
So how is it
that Belov has a warehouse full of sustainable wild fish? Because he scoured
the West Coast fleet for fishermen who were tapping into healthy stocks the
right way. Once he found them, he paid them a premium for their catch.
Belov walks me
around TwoXSea’s facilities. On the day I visit, he’s got Coho salmon—beautiful,
powerful, silvery fish—that were caught by the High Hope, out of Sitka,
Alaska, using a method called trolling, in which a few lines are dropped behind
a boat and pulled in one by one, reducing the risk of bycatch. He’s also got
black cod, targeted with baited lines set by the Eagle III in Coos Bay,
Oregon, and night smelt from Eureka, California. It was harvested by a
fisherman named Dude Gifford, who dips a net stretched across an A-frame of
poles into the surf. “We don’t sell anything that doesn’t come directly from a
fisherman,” Belov says.
The real
problem, he believes, is not that sustainable fish stocks aren’t out there.
It’s that a lot of unsustainable fish is passed off as OK. Belov and Foss are
also partners in a Sausalito restaurant called Fish, which Foss opened in 2004,
promising customers that everything on its menu could be eaten with a clear
conscience. They launched TwoXSea five years later because they got fed up with
all the dishonesty they encountered trying to supply fish for Fish. “There is
so much seafood fraud going on when it comes to labeling species, its origin,
and the captain and vessel,” Belov says. He tells me about the time he went
looking for scallops that hadn’t been caught by dredging, a process that tears
up the seabed. He met with two distributors from New York City and explained
that he would need traceability, vessel names, and documentation to confirm the
catch method. Their glib responses made it clear that the information would be
meaningless. “We have a long list of boat names,” they told Belov. “Just pick
any one you want.”
Belov is not
being paranoid. A 2013 study by Oceana, a nonprofit that campaigns to protect
and restore the world’s oceans, concluded that 33 percent of fish in the United
States is fraudulently labeled to increase profits. (There is now a
presidential task force trying to address the problem.) To emphasize the point,
Belov walks me outside onto the pier. He gestures toward two swordfish-longlining
vessels that are tied up alongside another fish distributor’s warehouse. “See
those boats?” he says. “Because they unloaded their swordfish here, it can be
labeled PRODUCT OF CALIFORNIA, which means it will be sold to diners as local
or San Francisco swordfish, even though it was caught 1,500 miles away in the
middle of the Pacific.” He says restaurants will probably describe the
swordfish as “line caught,” which sounds positively artisanal.
But both Belov
and Foss believe that things are getting better and that the success of TwoXSea
is in large part due to a younger generation of chefs who are making decisions
based on an ethical rather than a financial stance. “People are much more aware
of what is going on with dishonesty in seafood and all the fraud,” Belov says.
“But I still think we have a tremendous way to go,” adding that when it comes
to seafood sustainability, personal choices matter.
By the time
Belov is done with me, I have a few new beliefs. One is that you can eat some
wild seafood without trashing the oceans—wild-caught Alaskan salmon, for
example, is a well-managed fishery. Another is that, in a perfect world, we
would all know the name of the fisherman reeling in our fish, but that’s not
the reality for most of us. There is so much complexity in catch methods,
fishery management, and the supply chain that even a conscientious seafood
lover might as well throw a dart at the menu. Luckily, there’s an app for
that.
II. Red Light,
Green Light
The Monterey Bay
Aquarium, two hours south of San Francisco, is housed in an old sardine
cannery, and one of its feature attractions is a 335,000-gallon viewing
tank that contains a forest of California kelp. Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, 42,
the director of the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program and an environmental scientist, sits
down at a table in the cafeteria, her hair still damp from an early-morning
dive into the kelp. There are a lot of seafood standards out there, but Seafood
Watch’s are arguably the most independent, comprehensive, and rigorous, and it
has taken a tough, truth-telling approach to assessing fisheries’
sustainability. “When we started red-rating fisheries in our own backyard, that
was a really bold move,” Kemmerly says. “But after ten years lots of fish came
back, and the message was heard by fisheries up and down the coast.”
Seafood Watch
was launched in 1999, after aquarium visitors started walking off with
cafeteria display cards listing a few which-fish-to-eat recommendations. Seeing
an opportunity, the aquarium put together a program to produce detailed,
science-based evaluations of specific fisheries to publish on its website and in its app. Fish from well-managed, abundant
populations—caught in a way that caused little harm to other species or
habitat—got a green Best Choice designation. Fish that were OK to buy but were
harvested in a way that caused Seafood Watch some concern, garnered a yellow
Proceed with Caution tag, since changed to Good Alternative. Fish from a badly
managed, overfished, or destructive fishery got called out with a red Avoid
label.
Today, Seafood
Watch has more than 2,000 unique recommendations, on both wild and farmed
seafood, updated at least every three years. Of those, 22 percent are Best
Choice, 38 percent are Good Alternative, and 40 percent are Avoid. More than
1,000 North American companies use this information in their buying decisions,
and more than a million users have downloaded the app.
Seafood Watch
data affirms that, in well-managed U.S. fisheries, sustainable wild fish is
available. The program’s scientists recently assessed 129 species, which
account for three million metric tons of catch annually. Of that haul, more
than half a million tons, or 19 percent, are rated Best Choice. And just 2
percent are Avoid, which leaves 79 percent in the yellow Good Alternative
limbo—a rating that worries some seafood advocates because it sounds too much
like a buy recommendation. I mention to Kemmerly that eating a lot of
yellow-rated seafood doesn’t seem very sustainable. “It isn’t,” she says. “But
if we’d set the bar that you could only buy green, I don’t think this
market-based-incentive movement would be pragmatic.”
Still, the truly
conscientious seafood eater should aim to buy Best Choice, taking a
precautionary approach and reducing our impact on fragile and complex ocean
ecosystems. Plus, the more sustainable the rating, the less likely you are to
eat seafood caught by fish pirates. “If there is a known IUU”—illegal, unreported,
unregulated—“issue, then that will result in a red Avoid rating,” says
Kemmerly. Though she cautions, “Unless there is full traceability from boat to
plate, one can’t be sure if the product comes from a vessel that engaged in IUU
activity.”
Eating in the
green zone takes some dedication. That is, when you can find it and afford
it—wild-caught Alaskan salmon can cost upwards of $15 a pound. And even with
the app, you’ll have to ask a lot of questions.
Take albacore
tuna. If it was caught by trolling or with a pole, in the North Atlantic or
Pacific, Seafood Watch rates it a Best Choice. But if it was caught anywhere in
the world on a longline—except off Hawaii and in the U.S. Atlantic, which have
strict bycatch limits—it gets a red Avoid rating. Will the person selling you
the fish know how it was caught and where, and can you be sure that person’s
information is accurate?
Clear labeling
at supermarkets and restaurants would make life a lot easier for consumers, and
that is starting to happen. Seafood Watch and the Safina Center, a New
York–based ocean-conservation nonprofit run by marine ecologist Carl Safina,
have partnered with Whole Foods on labeling, which has sold no red-listed wild
seafood since 2012. Safeway, Target, and other supermarkets are working to
implement similar changes. Meanwhile, 145 restaurants listed on the Seafood
Watch site have also gone no-red.
What about when
there’s no labeling at all, which is the case in most restaurants and stores?
Use the app and ask questions about catch method and location. “It shows
businesses that they have to stay on it,” Kemmerly says.
After she takes
off for a meeting, I check out the aquarium’s cafeteria menu. The fish
tostadas, at $15, are made using albacore tuna. Troll- or pole-caught in the
Pacific, and not by longline, I assume, after glancing at my app. But I’d have
to ask.
III. Modern
Farmer
As diligent as
you might be with the Seafood Watch app, there isn’t enough sustainable wild
fish to feed the growing world. To fill the gap, many suppliers have turned to
aquaculture, which has exploded from producing 1.6 million metric tons in 1960
to 66.6 million metric tons in 2012 and now provides about half of all the
seafood we consume.
Farmed fish has
confused consumers for years. Is it healthy? Bad for the environment? “Like any
farming, aquaculture can be done well or it can be one of the most destructive
things,” says Safina, who has fought for the oceans for more than two decades.
“Particulars matter. There is sustainable aquaculture, and there are also fish
farms that have wrecked coastal zones and mangroves and done bad things to poor
people.”
Nearly 60
percent of fish farming takes place inland, in ponds and closed aquaculture
systems, and produces finfish like tilapia, catfish, and carp, as well as
shrimp. Pond farming conjures up images of overcrowded, feces-filled pools that
require chemicals and antibiotics. But these days, most U.S. inland farming is
done in line with good, healthy standards. U.S.–farmed catfish, salmon, and
shrimp are all Seafood Watch Best Choices. Tilapia is also popular, and if it’s
farmed in Canada, the U.S., or Ecuador, it too rates a Best Choice. Farmed
tilapia and carp from China and other parts of Asia often get dinged to yellow
for questionable chemical use and waste-management practices.
It’s the seafood
raised in marine environments—especially salmon and shrimp—that has given
aquaculture its controversial reputation. Waste, chemicals, antibiotics, and
unused feed pollute nearby waters, farmed-fish escapees from these net pens
threaten to spread disease and alien DNA to wild populations, and sensitive
coastal environments become industrialized.
Marine fish
farming also has a resource-use problem. It’s known as the fish-in, fish-out
(or FIFO) ratio, and it’s an important measure of sustainability. Consider
farmed salmon. According to Seafood Watch, it can take three pounds of smaller
forage fish, like anchovies, menhaden, and sardines, to create the feed needed
to produce a pound of salmon; even the most efficient farms have a ratio of
1.5:1. That’s not a particularly sustainable way to produce fish. For all these
reasons, until recently Seafood Watch slapped most finfish farmed in marine
environments with a red Avoid rating.
Kemmerly,
however, believes that we’re on the verge of a paradigm shift, thanks to
advances in aquaculture over the past decade or so. “It can be done
responsibly,” she says.
To see what the
future could look like, I seek out Josh Goldman, CEO of a company called Australis Aquaculture.
I find him, bespectacled and busy, in a cavernous two-acre warehouse complex in
Turners Falls, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River, which serves as company
headquarters. Inside, it’s warm and humid, and the air is redolent with the
sharp smell of a million fish, the sweet aroma of pellet feed, and the earthy
fug of damp concrete.
Goldman walks me
around, past massive tanks enmeshed in a complex web of -filters and industrial
piping, until we stop at a Jacuzzi-size tank teeming with beefy-looking
fish. They’re called barramundi, which is Aboriginal for “large-scaled fish.”
In the wild, they can be found from northern Australia up through Southeast
Asia and beyond, all the way to the coastal waters of India and Sri Lanka.
These fish, though, did all their growing in Goldman’s tanks, which
collectively contain 2.5 million gallons of water. Over 300 days, they were
transformed from tadpole-size hatchlings, weighing just one-third of a gram,
into meaty fish weighing one to two pounds.
To Goldman, the
key is domesticating the right fish. After years of trying to improve on
farming methods for popular species like striped bass, Goldman created a matrix
of qualities that would make for a better farmed fish and, in 2000, started
prospecting the world to find it. He ticks off some of the reasons barramundi
fit his better-fish matrix: they have the high fecundity of a marine fish
(large females can produce up to 40 million eggs in one season); they travel up
rivers to forage, which means they are tough and adaptable; and they eat a
flexible diet that includes plants. By experimenting with feed compositions
over the growth cycle, Goldman managed to drive the FIFO at Turners Falls down
to an impressive 0.98:1, meaning that it takes less than a pound of wild fish
to produce a pound of barramundi. Seafood Watch approved, rating Goldman’s
indoor barramundi, which has a sweet, buttery flavor and is packed with
omega-3’s, a Best Choice.
Goldman has been
experimenting with aquaculture since he first got hooked on the natural
sciences at Massachusetts’s Hampshire College in the early 1980s. He thinks
we’re in a transition from wild fish to farmed fish that is similar to the
transition 13,000 years ago from hunting meat to domesticating it. “But we have
the opportunity to learn from the mistakes,” he says.
Goldman’s next
challenge was to take barramundi out of the tanks and grow it to scale in a
marine net-pen farm. “People were looking at aquaculture in coastal zones as an
environmentally harmful activity,” he says. “I wanted to right that wrong.”
He went
prospecting again and found the location he needed in Van Phong Bay, on
Vietnam’s southeast coast. Australis Aquaculture Vietnam started production in
2010. Today it turns out some 2,000 tons of barramundi a year—more than three
times the output at Turners Falls, at roughly half the cost—and has permits to
scale up to 10,000 tons annually. Its frozen fillets are shipped to more than
4,000 stores across North America and cost a reasonable $9 a pound at my local
Whole Foods. Careful net-pen siting and low fish densities reduce pollution and
the threat of disease. Antibiotics are used sparingly and only as needed, and
escapees are rare and not much of a concern, since local barramundi were used
as the brood stock in Australis’s hatchery. Last year, after careful
inspection, Seafood Watch gave Australis Aquaculture Vietnam’s barramundi the
first green Best Choice rating ever granted to a marine net-pen fish.
“I don’t think
there is any question that barramundi can be a real player in global supply,”
says Goldman, who already has his eye on another fish that looks farm friendly,
though he won’t say what it is yet.
Meanwhile, for
the consumer, it’s now much easier to find farmed Best Choice options. Of the
176 farmed recommendations on Seafood Watch, 52 percent are Best Choice, 40
percent Avoid. From inland farms, there is rainbow trout, Arctic char, and
salmon. Then there’s marine net-pen fish like Goldman’s barramundi and New
Zealand’s newly green-rated Chinook salmon. If that’s hard to find, Best Choice
farmed tilapia and catfish, while not high in -omega-3’s, are still a healthy and
affordable protein.
IV. Vegan Fish
After visiting
Turners Falls, I start imagining a world increasingly fed by innovative
aquaculture. It’s a hopeful vision, except for one glitch—the FIFO problem.
Most of aquaculture relies on forage fish to provide fish meal for protein and
fish oil for omega-3 fats, which they get from eating microalgae and
phytoplankton in the ocean. But global forage-fish harvests have maxed out at
20 million to 25 million metric tons, a volume that some experts worry is too
high. The industry has been doing a better job scavenging from fish-processing
waste, but there are still a limited number of forage fish that can be taken
from the sea, which is a serious impediment to sustainable aquaculture growth.
This problem
inspired Bill Foss, Belov’s partner at Fish and TwoXSea, to ask fish farmers a
question that could change everything: Why do you need to have fish in your
feed?
“It’s been a
well-known fact that the amount of fish needed to feed a fish is a pretty
asinine way to produce a fish,” says Foss, sitting in a coffee shop in
Petaluma, California. Foss, who is 50 and has little patience for the
shortsightedness of the human race, tells me that about five years into
supplying fish for his restaurant, Belov found out that their farmed Best
Choice tilapia and trout—both of which can feed on plants—weren’t vegetarian.
Neither wanted to serve fish that consumed overstressed wild forage-fish
stocks. Besides, the cost of fish meal and fish oil has more than tripled over
a decade.
To formulate a
novel fish-free feed, Foss turned to a freethinking scientist: Rick Barrows, at
the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Bozeman, Montana. Barrows is a
slim, deliberate man, with wire-rim glasses and a wide mustache. His official
title is research physiologist. That’s a sterile description for someone who
has been on a decades-long quest to find the holy grail of aquaculture:
replacing fish meal and fish oil in the feeds that sustain the industry. His
research mainly takes place inside a lab tucked into the foothills outside
Bozeman, where 320 holding tanks are arrayed in neat clusters, most containing
small populations of rainbow trout. When Barrows shows me in, two assistants
are netting, weighing, and grading the growth of some trout—“the white rats of
aquaculture,” Barrows jokes—that are eating a pistachio-based feed made from
deformed nuts rejected for human consumption.
Barrows has
looked for an alternative to fish-based meal in everything from corn and soy to
pistachios and peas. He’s even experimenting with black soldier fly larvae. “It
was fairly easy to come up with a variety of new protein sources,” he
says.
Last year,
Barrows made more than 150 feeds for 22 fish species, and his research has
proved that at least eight popular fish-farm species, including trout, salmon,
and sea bass, can grow just as fast, or faster, on fish-meal-free feed. “If we
can do it with those eight, we can do it with any fish,” he says.
Replacing fish
oil, the key to providing the two omega-3’s—DHA and EPA—that are associated
with good brain and heart health, was more difficult, Barrows says. We head out
to look at the feed mill, where Barrows and his team homebrew their
experimental feeds. They start with a mash of whatever ingredients they’re
using and then run it through a massive twin-screw extruder, a machine used to
make everything from dog food to Froot Loops. Today it’s spitting out small
orange pellets, which drop into a large plastic garbage can. I suggest to
Barrows that people should skip the fish and just consume the pellets directly.
He grins. “Sure, you could eat it instead of cereal. Foss gave it a try.”
Foss and Barrows
eventually solved the omega-3 problem by adding an algae-based DHA supplement,
often used in baby formula, to the vegan feed, which also contains pea protein
and flax oil (and love, Belov jokes). Since 2010, they have tried it out on
successive generations of rainbow trout at a farm Foss and Belov purchased in
the Sierra Nevada near Susanville, California, run by David McFarland. The
results have been interesting. The trout show a good DHA profile and also seem
to be converting at least some of the DHA into EPA. “So DHA is all we need—the
trout does the rest. Kinda cool, huh?” says Foss. “Plus, the algal DHA has none
of the mercury or PCBs that come from forage fish, so we’re ahead in the health
game.”
Unfortunately,
the DHA supplement is expensive, which means that the vegan feed is
pricey—$1.50 a pound rather than the 80 cents a pound for standard
forage-fish-based feeds. That adds about 15 percent to the cost of the trout.
If the costs of fish meal and fish oil continue to climb, the price
differential will shrink or disappear. More demand and scaled-up production of
the vegan feed would also bring the cost down. “The biggest thing holding us
back is that someone like Whole Foods hasn’t said, ‘We want a million pounds of
what you’ve got,’ ” Foss grumbles.
Australis’s
Goldman, among others, is also experimenting with alternate plant-oil sources
that might produce omega-3’s in fish. Until more farmed fish fed a vegan diet
are widely available, try to add in FIFO-light options, like tilapia and
catfish, to your menu. There’s also another solution.
V. The Seafood
Chain
It’s tempting to
think that as long as something is a green Best Choice, you can eat as much as
you want. But Barton Seaver, a former chef who is now the director of the Healthy and Sustainable Food Program at Harvard’s T. H.
Chan School of Public Health, would like seafood lovers to be conscious of more
than a rating. Seaver, 36 and lanky, is a thoughtful presence who carries the
slightly haunted air of a man who is wearied by all he knows. To Seaver,
smaller portions and variety are key elements of sustainability. “What’s
important is eating less seafood more often,” he says, noting that we get more
nutrients than we need when we chow down on a large slab of fish.
Seaver spent his
summers as a child fishing and crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay’s Patuxent River.
In 2007, when he was 27, he opened Hook, a popular seafood restaurant in
Washington, D.C. He got interested in sustainability after he called up a
seafood supplier to place his first order. “Send me bluefish, crab, oysters,
rockfish,” he said, eager to feature all the Chesapeake bounty he had loved as
a boy. “Kid, what are you talking about?” the supplier responded. “We ate all
those.”
“I realized that
natural selection in our world is firmly holding a fork,” Seaver says.
I met with
Seaver in Portland, Maine, in January, to see his friend Gary Moretti’s Casco
Bay mussel farm. Moretti, a 63-year-old with the cheerful spirit of a man who
loves being on the water, co-owns Bangs Island Mussels with his son, Matt. As he gets ready
to back his converted lobster boat away from the wharf, a seal pops its head
up. “Hey, Loretta, get out of the way,” he calls. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a
fish later.”
Within minutes
we’re chugging toward Clapboard Island, where Bangs Island keeps four mussel
rafts—40-by-40-foot steel frames dangling 400 fuzzy ropes to a depth of 30 to
40 feet, for mussels to adhere to. In the relative warmth of the boat’s
wheelhouse, Moretti explains that siting a mussel farm is all about thinking
like a mussel. You want plenty of phytoplankton, minimal sediment, and nice
current-driven water flow that is uncontaminated by golf-course or industrial
runoff. “But this is Casco Bay. Here you can pretty much grow mussels
anywhere,” he says of the beautiful seascape around us.
We pull
alongside a mussel raft, and Moretti and Seaver hop onto the ice-slicked
girders. They tug up some lines to show me the thick clusters of blue-black
bivalves growing under the raft. It occurs to me that I am looking at the ideal
farmed protein. It requires no feed beyond the nutrients in the water, so it
has a perfect FIFO—no fish in for lots of shellfish out. It filter-feeds,
improving water quality instead of polluting it. There are a multitude of
coastal zones around the globe where mussels can grow in abundance. And while
they don’t pack the omega-3 wallop that salmon does, they do deliver a
shot—three servings a week gets you to the recommended minimum. Another bonus:
being low on the food chain, mussels have little mercury, more than 30 times
less than larger predator species like swordfish and tuna.
“The benefit of
mussels is you can’t be greedy and wolf them down,” says Seaver. “There is an
elegance and mindfulness to eating them.”
If ever there
was an animal protein that a vegan could adopt, the mussel is it, I decide.
Because of their rudimentary nervous system, they likely feel no pain and would
give me some DHA and EPA omega-3’s, which are mostly absent in the vegan diet.
(Flaxseed, popular with vegans, provides a different omega-3.) Farmed mussels
are a Seafood Watch Best Choice, but I start to think of them as a Super Green Choice.
I realize that
an interesting thing happens when you approach seafood with sustainability and
health in mind: you end up eating a diverse diet that pushes you lower down the
food chain and away from the rut of salmon, shrimp, and tuna, the most commonly
eaten seafood in the U.S. The healthiest, most sustainable seafood that’s also
high in omega-3’s and low in mercury? Wild Pacific sardines, a Best Choice.
Other green-listed options that have decent omega-3’s and low mercury:
U.S.–farmed striped bass, U.S.–farmed rainbow trout, farmed Arctic char,
Australis’s barramundi, and wild or farmed mussels. Wild or farmed oysters,
farmed scallops, farmed tilapia and catfish—use your Seafood Watch app to find
the Best Choice for these—are also highly sustainable and provide good protein,
some omega-3’s, and little mercury. For an occasional treat and a massive shot
of omega-3’s, have some Best Choice wild Alaskan salmon every once in a while.
That’s a pretty green way to get all the protein and omega-3’s you need without
going too heavy on the FIFO scale.
VI. Navigating
the Marketplace
When I get home,
I make a run to Costco to shop at the seafood counter with fresh eyes. It isn’t
easy. I see a few Marine Stewardship Council CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD
stickers. MSC is a nonprofit that certifies fisheries that meet its
sustainability and traceability standards. Though the standard has critics,
Seafood Watch recommends most MSC-certified fisheries and says that they are
equivalent to at least a yellow Good Alternative. Still, most of Costco’s
seafood is unlabeled. So it’s me and the Seafood Watch app.
I work my way
down the cooler. Farmed salmon from Chile—red, with an unappealing label that
says “color added.” (Some farmed salmon are fed the carotenoid astaxanthin to
give their flesh the orange color they’d normally get from eating shrimp and
krill in the wild.) MSC-certified wild Atlantic cod—yellow. Ahi tuna from the
Marshall Islands in the western Pacific—there’s no information on how it was
caught, and the Costco employee stocking the cooler doesn’t know, so I worry it
was a longline and would rate red. I find some tilapia farmed in Honduras, but
Seafood Watch is still in the process of rating it. In the frozen section, it’s
more of the same. Most everything seems to fall into that yellow,
not-egregious-but-not-really-OK category. I call Belov for guidance. “It’s so
complicated, and there are too many standards,” he says sympathetically. “We
have a long way to go, but all we can do is keep pushing and asking questions.”
Later, when I
check in with Bill Mardon, Costco’s assistant general merchandising manager in
fresh seafood and poultry, he explains that Costco doesn’t sell 12 of the most
overfished species and is working toward having more of its seafood supply meet
MSC or Aquaculture Stewardship Council standards. (ASC was created by the World
Wildlife Fund and the Sustainable Trade Initiative; its certified catfish,
shellfish, and shrimp equate to at least a Seafood Watch Good Alternative.)
“One hundred percent of our tilapia is ASC certified, and this year we are
getting going on salmon and shrimp,” Mardon says. “Call me in two, three, or
four years, and I hope we will be at 80, 90, or 100 percent.”
A few days later
I hit up my local Whole Foods, and the experience is a lot simpler. Whole Foods
sells MSC Certified Sustainable wild fish and puts Seafood Watch labeling on
any wild fish that MSC hasn’t certified yet. A graphic atop the counter
explains the color coding and tells shoppers that if it’s red, “We don’t sell
it!” “The whole point of having these high standards is that any choice you
make is a responsible one,” says Carrie Brownstein, the global seafood
quality-standards coordinator for Whole Foods and a former research coordinator
at the Safina Center.
I see a lot of
choice: croaker, halibut, cod, and hake. Most of the Seafood Watch labels are
yellow—which reflects the state of wild fisheries—but I spot some green-rated
Best Choice wild Spanish mackerel for $9 a pound. (Brownstein told me that
what’s available varies seasonally and regionally, which affects how much
green-rated wild fish you might find at any given time.) There’s also a lot of
farmed seafood—tilapia, catfish, shrimp, Arctic char. Whole Foods has certified
it with its own Responsibly Farmed logo, which requires aquaculturists to meet
a strict standard on pollution, chemical and antibiotic use, and other
criteria. Most of it, as far as I can tell, would earn a green, and I can see a
Best Choice menu here that my mother could happily live on. There’s a good
supply of oysters, mussels, and clams, both farmed and wild, and the farmed
tilapia and catfish. She might also be tempted by Spanish mackerel. In the
frozen section, I find some of Australis’s Vietnam barramundi fillets.
“Anything you
buy regularly, I’d stay in the green,” says Safina, who tries to eat only
seafood that he catches himself. “But if it’s something you splurge on once a
summer, then yellow is probably OK.” Still, he adds: “If you really want to be
conscientious about seafood, you should eat rice and beans.”
I agree. While
I’m encouraged by the promise of better fisheries management and aquaculture
innovation, I still don’t intend to eat fish, for the same reasons I stopped in
the first place. I believe in author Wendell Berry’s observation that “how we
eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used,” and I want to
use the world less. Fish raised in tanks, no matter how well cared for or
sustainable, are inevitably the human processing of living things. Even TwoXSea’s
delicious vegan rainbow trout, which spend their lives high in the Sierra
Nevada in perhaps the most beautiful farming environment on the planet, tug at
my conscience. To see them idling in concrete raceways instead of chasing an
insect hatch is a reminder that farmed life is a faint facsimile of life in the
wild. But I will maintain my exemption for mussels, which in my opinion are an
ethically defensible animal protein.
Regardless, a
sustainable approach to seafood has a lot to offer. Andy Sharpless, the CEO of
Oceana and the coauthor of a book about fish called The Perfect Protein,
says that if we stopped overfishing and gave spawning stocks a chance to
rebuild, most fisheries would fully recover within ten years and allow
sustainable harvests that are 20 to 40 percent higher than the current global
catch. “A well-managed global ocean could provide the equivalent of a healthy
seafood meal for a billion people every day forever,” he says.
Meanwhile, it’s
worth asking: How many apps rate other kinds of meat according to its
environmental footprint? “If we are scared away from buying farmed salmon
because it is red-listed, what do we do instead? We go buy ground beef,” Seaver
points out. “If you look at the environmental factors of protein by category,
often those other proteins—beef, pork, chicken—have a larger impact than even
the worst of the seafood products.”
So with
apologies to Michael Pollan, I’d recommend this for conscientious nonvegans: Eat
a lot less meat and a lot more sustainable seafood, wild when you can verify
it, and lower on the food chain, but mostly farmed, particularly mussels,
clams, and oysters.
On the way back
from Clapboard Island with Seaver and Moretti, stamping our feet in the
wheelhouse to stay warm, I fantasized out loud about a universal food-labeling
system that would rate everything according to its environmental impact and
health benefits. Of course, I’d like an animal-welfare rating, too, but I don’t
want to get carried away. Moretti told me about his fantasy: converting used
offshore drilling platforms into massive mussel farms to help feed a growing
world population. “In my dream, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett calls me up and
says: ‘Hey, Gary, I really think we should do that oil-rig-mussel thing. Here’s
$100 million.’” We smiled at the improbabilities—and the
potential.
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Tim Zimmerman
