la.foodblogging

In local media, literature and in daily conversations with friends, seafood inevitably comes up as a healthy source of low-fat protein. I’ve vowed to eat more fish with the hope of adding more fatty acids and lean protein to my diet. But I haven’t been following the diet plan actively, nor have I been all too aware of the impact that the increased demand for fish has had on the ocean.

Global consumption of seafood products has doubled over the past 30 years driven by population growth and rising income levels. The United States, European Union, and Japan are the “Big Three” consumers for 80% of all seafood traded internationally, link.

Disturbing info about the fishing industry is detailed in Gutted, a docu about commercial overfishing that aired on PBS’s Wide Angle tonite. I learned some things that will definitely impact how I consume fish in the future. At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, or providing information you already know about commercial fishing, here are some frightening fish facts:

For every pound of shrimp that is trawled, it has been estimated that between two to ten pounds of sea life is caught and discarded as bycatch (a.k.a., left for dead).

A super-trawler called the American Monarch weighs in at 6,730 tons and is as long as a football field. It can process 1.3 million pounds of fish every day, which are caught in nets several miles long, and fishes for a plethora of extremely valuable fish species including blue whiting, hoki, shrimp, and Pollack.

During the 1980s, the stocks of several commercially important fish species found in California waters, such as the rockfish (sold in restaurants as red snapper), were decimated by overfishing and poor resource management. Biologists predict it will take 50 to 100 years for the rockfish stocks to recover if fishing for them is halted.

In the past, shrimping nets killed more than 50,000 turtles annually, but today that number has declined significantly in the U.S. due to the mandatory use of Turtle Excluder Devices, or TEDs, which allow up to 97-percent of turtles to escape trawl nets.

At present, less than 0.5% of the world’s oceans are protected.

In 2003, Canadian researchers estimated that in the past 50 years, over-fishing has eliminated 9 out of 10 large predators such as tuna, swordfish, cod, and sharks.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Oceans Alive project has printable Seafood Watch pocket guides that look much like wallet-sized tip guides. They detail best choices (i.e., Pacific Halibut, farmed Catfish, and Dungeness Crab) and good alternatives (i.e., Maine Lobster, English and Dover Sole, and longline caught Albacore Tuna). Species to avoid altogether due to rampant overfishing: Chilean seabass, Atlantic cod, King crab, Monkfish, red snapper, imported swordfish, bluefin tuna.

The PBS website has a info-graphic guide to sushi that goes into some detail about the issues associated with fishing crab (go with Dungeness), shrimp, roe, tuna (the bluefin pop. has fallen almost 90% since the ’70s), squid, and salmon (best bet is wild salmon from Alaska).

There’s also an interesting interview with Leon Panetta, chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission, on the Wide Angle site. Panetta describes why it is so hard to grasp the devastation of our oceans because the plundering all occurs below the surface. He notes that local restaurants that haven’t already will change their menus due to consumer pressure. Seafood Watch has just the hand-outs for ocean-friendly advocates, link.