Mark Bittman, AKA The Minimalist, has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this week, about the future of fish. A few key points:
- If current fishing practices continue, many major commercial fish stocks will likely collapse in the next fifty years. Many fish populations have already been seriously depleted.
- Smaller fish species like herring, anchovies and sardines are also in trouble, as they're being caught and made into fish meal for livestock and farmed fish. Using fish meal to feed farmed fish is extremely inefficient - at least three kilos of small fish go to produce one kilo of farmed fish.
- Industrial aquaculture negatively impacts the environment in a number of ways - it destroys shoreline, such as mangrove forests, pollutes water with fish feces, and kills off wild fish species.
- Solutions? Develop a taste for the small fish, so they'll no longer be used as fish feed. So quit eating low-quality farmed salmon and go for some nice mackerel instead. And give fishermen shares in fisheries, but fix the total number of catch per year.
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