Seafood
jjacquet | September 18, 2008Say you're in Australia. You go to the store. You pick up some Kalamari crumbed seafood rings. The 'K' throws you but you suspect the product is still calamari, which is very popular in your country. Hopefully, you even know that means squid. You've been duped!
Austrimi Seafoods must drop the name Kalamari crumbed seafood rings, to avoid giving buyers the impression that the product mainly contains calamari rings. Only 4 per cent of the product contained squid according to the ingredients list, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said. The real question: what was the other…
jjacquet | September 13, 2008Focusing on subsidies rather than consumers likely to be better for fish and for small-scale fishermen
A couple weeks ago, Daniel Pauly and I got the paper Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-scale Fisheries published in the journal Conservation Biology. In our analysis, we try to demonstrate that conservationists attempts to encourage sustainable fisheries at the market level should place at least equal emphasis on eliminating harmful fisheries subsidies as on consumer-based approaches (e.g., wallet cards that advise on which fish to eat).
More emphasis on eliminating subsidies might…
jjacquet | August 14, 2008A British trawler was caught on film dumping tons of cod and other white fish overboard. This wasteful practice of discarding 'bycatch' is the result of catching fish that are too small (according to regulations) or unmarketable. The film caused quite the uproar, though it should be noted that this absurdity occurs frequently in waters all around the world and is most common in shrimp fisheries. The Sea Around Us Project's Dirk Zeller and Daniel Pauly published a paper in 2005 on how discards are declining globally but that this decrease is not exactly a grand accomplishment given that…
jjacquet | July 24, 2008Check out some research that was presented (that I unfortunately did not get to see) at the Society for Conservation Biology conference in Chattanooga, TN. Here is what the scientist did: he gave consumers the option of eating caviar from a "rare" species of sturgeon or a "common" species of sturgeon. Most consumers, even before trying it, imagined they would like the "rare" eggs best. After eating it, 70% of consumers preferred the "rare" species. But here's the kicker: all the caviar was from farmed sturgeon. This means that certain rare species that are desired in luxury markets--…
jjacquet | July 5, 2008Check out some thoughts on overfishing and sustainable seafood (including my own) compiled by Greenpeace here.
jjacquet | June 27, 2008Believe it. Pigs and poultry gobble down 14 million tonnes of seafood (more than twice the amount the Japanese consume) every year because we feed it to them. Read my full post on the subject at The Gristmill.
jjacquet | June 24, 2008Mark Powell at Blogfish points to an article in last week's Miami Herald where a reporter had to bow out of his search for sustainable seafood because it was too much work and too expensive. The messages are, indeed, too mixed and confusing (we established that after the episode last summer that involved Al Gore eating (un?)sustainable toothfish). Witness the confusion yourself firsthand at this website from the makers of Fishbase, which compiles the recommendations from different sustainable seafood advocates for different fish. For some fish (e.g., Atlantic salmon) there is unanimity,…
jjacquet | June 18, 2008Yesterday, Greenpeace-USA released a report criticizing supermarkets for buying unsustainable seafood. Greenpeace-Canada also released a similar report, which I spoke about this morning on CTV news. As I said in the interview, if we want sustainable seafood to become something more than just yuppie food, we're going to have to affect behavior on a big scale and supermarkets (where, in Canada, for instance, two-thirds of seafood is sold) are one medium for doing this. One way to motivate supermarkets to change their buying behavior is through affecting their reputation with negative…
jjacquet | June 10, 2008Taras Grescoe, author of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood has a new article out in the New York Times on why we should opt for sardines over salmon. On the one hand, I disagree with Grescoe's overall premise that we can steer consumption to achieve a desirable outcome. Consumers alone cannot save our fish. On the other hand, I commend his efforts to raise awareness and support for eating lower on the marine food web. Check out his article and see what you think...
jjacquet | May 19, 2008A couple weeks ago, Greenpeace invaded the Brussels Seafood Expo and hung signs calling attention to the dismal state of tuna fisheries. Just a week later, Greenpeace-USA announced its forthcoming publication that ranks U.S. supermarkets in terms of procuring sustainable seafood. This is an analogue to the U.K. campaign that has so far been one of my favorite market-based seafood initiatives (read about it here) because it uses negative messaging to affect reputation.
Last week, I spoke with Greenpeace-USA's John Hocevar, who is spearheading the U.S. initiative. He revealed Greenpeace's…
jjacquet | May 13, 2008Over the weekend, the Observer's Alex Renton gave it to us straight on how the world's oceans are running out of fish. Here's just a taste:
Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-…
jjacquet | May 7, 2008We know fishmeal has problems. After posting an article back in January on the potential for bugmeal to replace fishmeal in farmed fish production, several readers asked some hard questions and wanted more information. I like readers to get what they want, so I spoke with Dr. Lou D'Abramo, who has a doctorate from Yale University and has been working to create more sustainable aquaculture systems for freshwater prawns. He is also the lead scientist studying how striped bass are responding to insect meal at Mississippi State University and got encouraging results. I pointed Dr. D'Abramo…
jjacquet | April 7, 2008Holy Macaroni (and I don't mean tuna noodle casserole)--this blog is one year old today! On April 8th last year, Randy Olson moved the Shifting Baselines blog to Scienceblogs and, for its launch, we staged a debate on whether or not to eat seafood. One year later, our seafood debate is still raging and relevant so I thought I would re-post our thoughts (but don't miss out on the original comments here).
SHOULD WE CONTINUE TO EAT SEAFOOD?
YES, SAYS RANDY OLSON: Until There Is Effective Leadership, There Is Little Point in Making Sacrifices
I say we should not be expected to stop eating…
jjacquet | April 7, 2008The Economist published an article last week on jellyfish, which featured a fellow graduate student at the Fisheries Centre, Lucas Brotz. Can jellyfish really be the future of seafood? Jellyfish only provide about 4 calories per 100 g but, beyond that, there is a real danger of encouraging demand for a product that was spawned from unhealthy and poorly managed oceans...
Jellyfish push out incredibly valuable, and diverse, marine ecosystems. Scientists may somehow turn jellyfish into food, tyres or flip-flops, but it is hard to imagine an industry based on a product that is at least 95%…
jjacquet | February 22, 2008This week, the New York TImes ran the Op-Ed How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It by Taras Grescoe, who is author of a new book about ethically eating seafood. "One of the great unsung epics of the modern era is the worldwide diaspora of marine invasive species," explains the author. Jellyfish, Asian carp, cholera bacteria, seaweed, diatoms, clams, water fleas, shrimps, and others are invading waters around the world. Many of them find their new homes via ship ballast water. But to think the problems associated with marine invasive species are something new would be a shifting baseline…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: environment, commercial fishing industry, bottom trawling, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, seafood
Landsat satellite image, Gulf of Mexico (mouth of Vermillion Bay, Louisiana), taken on 10/12/92. Note the abundant narrow sediment trails, most in shallow water (
Image: SkyTruth [larger view].
Ain't technology grand? Thanks to Landsat satellite images, which are available on the internet, the ordinary citizen can now see what is happening to our planet -- but sadly, much of it is not good. For example, the above image of the Gulf of Mexico was taken by a Landsat satellite in 1992. The…
jjacquet | February 3, 2008Lent is the biggest time of year for seafood sales (more on that soon) but, according to the industry supported news source IntraFish, the Superbowl unofficially launches the seafood selling season. Supermarket retailers everywhere offered plenty of seafood platters and party specials for Americans watching the big game.
jjacquet | February 1, 2008
Molded surimi lobsters from Surimi & Surimi Seafood by J.W. Park (2005).
We've talked about surimi before, but it's worth a reminder on the official definition: "Surimi is stabilized myofibrillar proteins obtained from mechanically deboned fish flesh that is washed with water and blendedwith cyroprotectants." And then surimi is shaped into things people really want to eat, like lobster and shrimps (also in the photo). More than half a million tonnes of pulverized fish are shaped into things humans really want to eat every year...just another shifting baseline.
jjacquet | January 30, 2008Stop the presses. This sushi debate is getting out of control. I have had to revisit the YouTube of sea otters holding hands to remind myself that almost 10 million humans still have a soul--that it's not all about us and our mercury levels.
You probably know what happened. Marian Burros wrote an article about mercury in sushi tuna that got on the front page of the January 23rd New York Times. Blogs (including this one) peddled it. Later NYTimes articles espoused its findings, though said sushi-lovers would ignore them. The fishing industry cried factual errors (they wrote a letter to…
jjacquet | January 25, 2008Bugmeal to replace fishmeal?
We know it's wasteful to grind up one-third of our wild caught fish into fishmeal to feed it to pigs, chickens, and fish. But hope for our tiny fish might lie in an unlikely source: bugs.
Apparently, a group of scientists and at least one entrepreneur is taking the need to find a substitute for fishmeal seriously. According to Seafood.com News, there is a new interest in mass-producing insects as a sustainable protein source to replace fish meal in fish and livestock feeds.
Ernest Papadoyianis, president of Neptune Industries, said his company was searching for…