Keeping seafood sustainable

by Don Genova

Drum roll please. I’ve discovered the solution to the world crisis in shrinking wild fish stocks… EAT MORE FISH!

But we have to eat the right fish. In North America, we like to eat big fish, which use up more resources to farm and, in the wild, have more dangerous concentrations of pollutants and smaller populations. Little fish, meanwhile, have more sustainable populations and are healthy to eat because of fewer pollutants and beneficial fats.

Aquaculture proponents are researching ways to grow salmon more quickly by using techniques such as genetic modification. Tuna are being captured and then “ranched” in pens to fatten them up, and fish such as cod, sablefish, and halibut are now being farmed, as well. They are all fed pellets made up of smaller fish, which are cheaper and more abundant.

So why don’t we eat those smaller fish? Because we often look down our noses at fish that don’t have the prestige of salmon or halibut. We think sardines come only in a can and that salty, fishy anchovies are the item to hold when ordering a fully loaded pizza. Catfish are ugly, goes our rationale, and carp are what you find in outdoor goldfish ponds…

At the B.C. Sardine Festival in Steveston last year, it was easy to see that Canada’s ethnic populations know a good fish when they see it. Asian and Portuguese immigrants lined up for more than an hour to buy fresh sardines off a boat. You could buy 10 big fish for $5, an inexpensive source of protein that’s loaded with heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

When I attended the Slow Fish convention in Genoa, Italy, earlier this year, I bought a heaping plate of battered and fried anchovies that were just longer than my middle finger. Hot and crisp, and not salty, they were a perfect snack to crunch on while I listened to panel discussions featuring top experts on seafood economies and the ocean environment.

One of those was John Volpe of the Environmental Studies department at the University of Victoria. He says it just doesn’t make sense to turn large seafood species such as salmon and tuna into lower-priced commodities that everyone can afford to buy. “People don’t think about the impact fish farming can have, in the long term, on the social and ecological issues facing coastal communities,” he said. “Cheap farmed salmon is nothing but bad news for the B.C. wild salmon resource. The real worth of that wild salmon is diminished by having a farmed product compete with it in terms of price only.”

The B.C. Liberal government isn’t likely to adopt the recommendations offered by the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture. The committee, dominated by NDP MLAs, called for an end to all salmon farming as it now exists on the B.C. coast within the next five years.

But there are alternatives. Brian Halweil is a senior researcher with the WorldWatch Institute in Washington, D.C. He thinks we should raise and eat more vegetarian fish such as catfish, monkfish, and carp, so we don’t use animal protein to grow more animal protein. Halweil also mentioned ongoing research into a “polyculture” of aquaculture. This would see algae being grown on the surface of a net pen that would make up part of the feed for salmon. The salmon feces that normally settle on the ocean floor could be reduced by putting filter feeders such as mussels and oysters on strings below the salmon. It’s an intriguing proposition.

So, if we start eating lower on the food chain with smaller fish, or fish that don’t eat animal protein to grow, or more shellfish such as oysters, mussels, and clams (which are simply filter feeders), and if we choose carefully from a list of sustainable harvests of larger fish, we might be able to push back some of the scientific predictions that have us eating nothing but farmed fish within the next 40 years. Wouldn’t you like to enjoy eating some wild salmon with your grandchildren, instead of telling them, “When I was a kid, we used to get this great sockeye every summer…”?

For more information: The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California was one of the first aquariums to link seafood sustainability to consumers (mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp). In Canada, the Vancouver Aquarium has followed suit with the Ocean Wise program (vanaqua.org/conservation/oceanwise); restaurants may join if they serve sustainable fish dishes (as many of the city’s finest, including C and Blue Water, now do). SeaChoice is another new Canadian resource (seachoice.org).

Don Genova is a B.C. food journalist who is living in Italy for the next few months. You can keep up with his adventures at dongenova.com.

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