How Can We Eat Seafood More Sustainably?

Many of us love seafood, be it a battered cod with chips, a tuna sandwich at work or an exquisitely smoked slab of salmon. Yet we all love the ocean also and protecting it at the same time as satisfying our fishy cravings is difficult. This guide hopes to give you some hints and tips as to how you can make your seafood choices more sustainable and by sustainable, we mean that you support fisheries which protect future fish populations, minimise environmental damage and help sustain local coastal industries. Soon you’ll be able to order your seaside fish and chips without receiving a side order of guilt with it.

Our fishing scene has transformed from an activity carried out in tiny timber boats with hauls large enough to feed the family, to an industrial scale environmental disaster with fish factories now commanding our seas and processing thousands of tons of fish every year. Due to this dramatic upscaling of operations, 90% of fish stocks are now fully or overexploited, meaning their populations are on the verge of collapse. The case of the Grand Banks cod fishery in Newfoundland, Canada highlights what may soon happen to many of our fish populations if we continue to make unsustainable choices. At the beginning of the 1900s, the Grand Banks fishery was so full of cod that men struggled to row against the power of the schools swimming in the ocean. Due to this plentiful bounty, fishermen came from Scandinavia, Spain, Russia and China to take advantage. However, we soon started developing floating fish factory vessels full of gigantic freezers which allowed fishermen to catch thousands of fish before finally returning home. By 1994, cod populations were at 1% of their 1960 size and the fishery was forced to close soon after, leaving 45,000 Newfoundland locals without jobs while devastating the local economy. 25 years later and the cod are still only returning in small numbers, in part due to the seabed damage caused by trawling nets meaning the sandy floor fails to sustain a wide variety of marine life.

This example highlights some of our major problems. Firstly, we are overfishing populations to the point of collapse, with Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna teetering on the edge of extinction. Fishing quotas have been introduced to limit the number of individuals each fishing vessel can catch but in recent years, this has led to its own problems. If fishing vessels caught too many fish for their quota, the excess would simply be dumped overboard to avoid hefty fines once they pull into the harbour, meaning edible but now dead fish are being thrown back out under the waves. Many other laws have targeted the types of nets we use in our industries as before the 1960s, there were hardly any restrictions on what we could throw overboard, meaning drift nets often stretched to over 50 kilometres! Now driftnets are limited to 2.5 kilometres, although this still sounds quite astonishingly large, while parts of America have banned the use of long lines over 200 miles from the coastline. Long lines are thin single lines which can still be tens of kilometres long and are covered in baited hooks which attract an array of non-target species such as seabirds. By banning the use of these nets in the high seas, albatrosses and other creatures living in isolated atolls are less likely to swoop the hooked bait and entangle themselves in the process. Our legislation, informed by conservation scientists, is also now starting to ban some types of fishing nets in the migratory pathways of whales and seabirds to avoid the risk of bycatch which is another major issue with today’s fishing methods.

So because we are still overexploiting natural fish stocks despite modern legislation, fish farms known as aquaculture are now providing half of our seafood with this rate set to increase rapidly. Fish farms are often large nets or cages anchored close to the coastline and, in some areas of the world, this has caused coastal mangroves to be destroyed. In fact, shrimp farming is responsible for 38% of mangrove destruction yet these ecosystems are essential for carbon storage and for acting as a natural barrier to storm surges and flooding. Over 600 species are farmed around the world and these caged animals eat a mighty one third of the global fish harvest! For salmon, three tons of fishmeal, which includes anchovies, sprat and herring, are needed to produce only one ton of salmon and the exploitation of these small fish species are causing their populations to plummet, marking a dramatic turn in our food chain collapse. So with all these issues, you can see why it is easy to choose unsustainable, environmentally damaging fish.

The Marine Conservation Society’s website or app is one of the most useful places where you can find information about sustainable fish choices as it is regularly updated with which populations are currently struggling to sustain their numbers. They produce a handy traffic light guide to rate your fish choices with seabass, European eel, grouper, bluefin tuna and whitebait being some of the current red listed species. Atlantic cod is also given a red rating however there are 14 different stocks within this ocean so visiting your local fishmonger is the best way to find out exactly where your fish has come from and how those stocks are doing. If they don’t know exactly where the fish has come from or, for example, the species of tuna they are selling, it’s best to turn somewhere else for sustainable fish! In the case of tuna, ever up there as one of the best toasted sandwich fillings, it is best to buy skipjack or albacore tuna which have much larger populations left in our oceans. Greenpeace has released a list of UK supermarkets and their ethically sourced tuna with Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose topping the charts. When you buy tuna, just be sure to double check that it has been caught with a pole and line to stop any bycatch of species such as dolphins, sharks and baby fish. Ensuring that you purchase larger fillets is another way to help out our piscine populations as it avoids buying juvenile fish which were not old enough to reproduce and add to their population. You can also look out for the Marine Stewardship Council logo which is on 5,000 fish products worldwide and signifies that the fish contained inside the packet was caught in an environmentally ethical way.

Possibly one of the most significant ways we can increase our marine-friendly behaviour is by varying the fish we eat. In Britain, we mainly eat only five types of fish - cod, tuna, haddock, salmon and prawns - yet our fishing fleet lands over 150 species each year! By balancing the species we choose to eat, we can ensure that one particular species is not in incredibly high demand and being rapidly targeted by vessels. If we all stop eating cod but switch to haddock as our next best alternative, the haddock will simply follow a similar fate to the cod just a couple of decades down the line. The best alternatives to our quintessential cod and chips are pollack, hake and sea bream but if you want to be really sustainable, you can change your choices depending on the season. Fishmongers will not only be able to give you all this information and more but by purchasing local fish, you support regional industries and reduce your carbon footprint which is surprisingly high for fish; did you know America imports 90% of its seafood? If all this sounds beyond your limited cooking repertoire, the Eat Fish app is full of regularly updated seasonal recipes to get you started.

So by making some of these small changes and becoming more conscious as you push your overfull trolley done the shop aisle, you are actually helping preserve our wonderfully diverse ocean system. As you and many others continue choosing sustainable options, you encourage supermarkets and restaurants to demand the same environmentally-friendly characteristics from their suppliers and the movement can travel back through the supply chain right out to the boats swaying on the horizon as they haul in their latest line of intriguingly diverse fish for you to cover in salt and vinegar or slide onto your dinner plate.

By Neve McCracken-Heywood