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Which Fish: With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?
- davidhollander 15y agoSeafoodWatch already has a pretty solid iPhone and Android app that does this[1], but I'm all for more options and having raw JSON available. [1] http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_iPhone.aspx http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_i...
- Alex3917 15y agoYou can also get the same information online here: http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1540 http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1540 (eco best / worst) http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694 http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694 (health best / worst) You can even get a pocket guide that goes into your wallet that you can take out whenever you go into a sushi restaurant or fish market. Here in NYC there are a lot of hedge fund managers with serious neurological problems from eating sushi every day for years. They manage billions of dollars in assets but their hands twitch like they have parkinsons.
- rwolf 15y agoThanks a lot for posting the pocket guide. I like pretending to know what I'm doing when I eat sushi, and that guide will help to artificially limit my options so it looks less like I'm choosing at random (and eating healthier to boot!).
- reedlaw 15y ago"Which are okay to eat?" implies how much mercury is present, but it seems this question is from an environmental perspective.
- jeremymims 15y agoThe environmental perspective is the most important. The truth is the oceans are dying and overfishing has created colossal dead zones. The best option that should be on this list is to not eat any fish at all.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoPreserving fish species is more important than not poisoning yourself?
- elmomalmo 15y agoDead zones are not created by overfishing but by intensive farming techniques on land and what's subsequently washed into the sea via rivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
- Duff 15y agoUnfortunately, international legal frameworks with respect to the oceans are not keeping pace with technology. Anything that reduces consumer demand is a good thing, but American demand in the big picture is a small piece of pie. The Japanese will not be satisfied until every last aquatic creature is extracted from the Mediterranean. America's biggest contribution to eradicating sea life are the destructive land use policies in the Mississippi watershed. We provide ridiculous incentives via direct payment to grow corn with massive quantities of fertilizer, build massive levee systems to reclaim floodplain land and cut canals in the Mississippi delta. All of these things together have turned the Gulf of Mexico into an aquatic wasteland.
- davidhollander 15y ago> The best option that should be on this list is to not eat any fish at all. Your logic fails for the following reasons: - not all fish are from the ocean - not all species of fish are in fact overfished. There is no Sardine crisis. - Fish consumption is linked to increased IQ including in babies and children - Piscetarians have lower rates of heart disease than both vegans and occasional meat eaters - Promoting abstinence over harm reduction is generally a very silly and inefficient way to do things
- yequalsx 15y agoThe person you responded to stated a belief that environmental considerations were the most important. The website that started these conversations has listed only ocean fish. Three of the five points you listed have nothing to do with the environment. Your statement about jeremymims logic is out of place. There are negative environmental impacts from ocean fish farms. I don't enough about non-ocean fish farms to comment on the environmental impacts of non-ocean fish farms though.
- elmomalmo 15y agoI disagree, I very much read that as 'which are [environmentally] ok to eat'. However, a friend's wife is pregnant. He - being somewhat preoccupied with pregnancy at the moment - may well have read it they way you did.
- mrspeaker 15y agoI think that would make an interesting poll... how many people read it as "Which are okay to eat - for our planet" and how many read it as "Which are okay to eat - for my health"?
- sixtofour 15y agofor my health, until I scrolled to the bottom.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoFor the planet. Funnily enough my little lad asked me randomly "can we have cod". I'm conscious that we should only eat tuna once a week (line caught seems hot at the moment) but don't eat much fish and hadn't thought about mercury/environmental chemicals for other catches.
- lean 15y agoI assumed this was about mercury levels too, I would have never guessed it was environmental.
- AJ007 15y agoI'm not going to run down the whole list, but some of the worst from a mercury perspective -- shark, swordfish, and most types of tuna are listed here as "not okay to eat." May be there is a correlation between larger fish with the most mercury and fish that are more endangered. The fish in my diet consists almost entirely of salmon and trout, and occasionally a tuna tartare (I would have a real hard time giving that one up.) I avoid farmed stuff.
- Zarkonnen 15y agoThere is actually a correlation: large, predatory fish accumulate the most mercury because they're highest on the food chain, and they also tend to be rare and slow to breed, and hence more endangered. With farmed fish it basically depends on where it's farmed. It can be very healthy and sustainable, or quite terrible.
- jonknee 15y ago"With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?" makes it really obvious...
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI eat fish 3 or 4 days a week but I almost never eat any of the fish listed as "not okay". Cod is the only exception. Price seems to regulate this list pretty well.
- benstein 15y agoBlue Ocean Institute makes a similarly up-to-date sustainable and healthy seafood database accessible via text message. Text FISH to 30644 to try it.
- jellicle 15y agoThis is a silly list. Not because fish aren't important, but because there's no way to take action on this list. Studies have shown that a huge amount of fish is mislabelled. Yes, pick up a piece of xxxx from a seafood market and the odds are that it's not xxxx. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/science/earth/27fish.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/science/earth/27fish.html Consumers have no effective way to verify what they're eating. This is a situation where there is either government action or no action; no private personal actions can be successful, barring the creation of instant cheap at-the-restaurant-table DNA analysis.
- Zarkonnen 15y agoThat's a very interesting link, but saying that we might as well not bother because there's labeling issues is rather overstating the problem. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
- cosgroveb 15y agoDid you even read the lede? >Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful. The link states that overfished species are being intentionally mis-labelled. I would say that, yes, we might as well not bother if the seafood industry is going to pull these kind of shenanigans, absent some sort of regulation from the government (an unpopular sentiment here).
- Zarkonnen 15y agoWell, I'm actually all for government regulation of this kind of thing. In fact, I would argue that this is a wonderful example of a case where government regulation is required for the free market to function: markets depend on a good flow of correct information to function.
- dagw 15y agoabsent some sort of regulation from the government Surely there must be laws against this already. I have a hard time imagining that claiming that you're selling X when you're in actual fact selling Y is legal. If no one is being prosecuted it must be because the government doesn't care enough, not because they lack laws to prosecute under.
- IanDrake 15y agoI usually only eat what I can catch. And if I can catch it, well... that fish just won the Darwin award because I suck at fishing.
- spodek 15y agoYou can't tell just by having caught it. If it already had a lot of children and propagated its genes it's not very eligible for winning.
- forgotAgain 15y agoA title of "..which are sustainable" would be clearer. The article concerns the sustainability of the fish and not the goodness of them as a food. There is for example no mention of the problems of eating catfish farm raised in China (high levels of toxins).
- sixtofour 15y agoYes, this was my impression/confusion exactly. Even seeing "under pressure" at the top, I still thought the list was fish that are safe to eat, in light of or despite pressures. It would be good to have a second list along side, fish that are safe to eat. Or just one list, safe and sustainable.
- eykanal 15y agoSooo, why is this top link on HN? Am I missing some nifty tech embedded in the site, or is everyone here just interested in fish?
- kahawe 15y agoCan't eat beef because of mad cow and the heavy medication used in breeding; same goes for pigs and chicken and all other mass-produced meat. On top of that you have the question of animal cruelty and the questionable necessity of killing animals to eat them attached to it. Plus it is generally not that healthy to eat it all the time and you shouldn't eat meat more than once or twice a week or so. Can't eat fish for all the mercury and lots of them being close to extinction and it kills dolphins and damages the oceans. Can't eat eggs or milk, again for cruelty and various possible diseases or other contamination. And vegetables and fruits? Well, practically all of the mass produced ones never EVER saw any soil or real sunlight but artificial gel to grow on and were picked by poor and heavily underpaid and downright exploited people from (and typically in) poor countries under inhuman conditions and bought by the rich nations for next to nothing. (here is to you, militant vegetarians!) On top of that they are heavily laden with chemicals of all sorts and chances are when you get to buy them, they are far from being fresh. Plus for practically all the food mentioned above: production heavily, grossly outranks what actually ends up being bought... so we just dump it, burn it or do FSM-knows what with it. We certainly do NOT give it to the starving people in this world because it would cost too much. And if you go organic and local farmers only? Apart from few choices, you have even less inspections and regulations to protect your safety because you don't know what they are selling, what it grew on and how clean and safe to eat it is. And some of it just taste absolutely horrible. This is just pathetic... the whole food industry, front to back, top to bottom. If you go by the warnings on what to avoid, what is dangerous for your health and what is immoral and wrong to eat, we better come up with a way to get by on nothing but sunlight and water quickly. But then again, fresh water supplies are currently being bought up by Big-Food to make lots and lots of money and water in bottles is very often not as clean as one might hope and certain chemicals from plastic bottles could basically work like estrogen in your body.
- DanielStraight 15y agoFor decades we as a species have been deciding to turn food into an industry. This decision has had disastrous consequences, but like CO2 in the atmosphere it can't be reversed overnight. Cross-pollination can bring genetically modified strains into organic crops, making it hard to keep a crop organic even if you want to. Run-off from industrial agriculture has damaged water and soil, which will impact whatever is planted, whether organic or not. Soil depletion has also lead to decreased nutrient presence in fruits and vegetables. Industrial agriculture has reduced the number of varieties of each species grown. Why does all broccoli look the same? Surely pre-industry, there were numerous varieties of broccoli. Land is not divided in such a way to make local, small-scale, organic farms practical. Where are you going to put a farm in New York City or Los Angeles? This is not to say the problem can't be fixed, but we are living in a non-ideal time for food, so there won't be any ideal choices. The only thing you can do is make better choices, and try to turn the direction of food production around so that eventually ideal choices will be possible.
- natural219 15y agoI read this as, "with the price of equities in the fish market dropping, which fish are safe to eat, presumably because those companies will be more lax with health codes?" I was way off.
- lucifer 15y agoRadioactive Japanese Fish are "okay to eat".
- metaprinter 15y agoFour Fish by Paul Greenberg - tackles this very subject. I recommend it. http://roundvalleyfishing.com/2011/06/15/book-review-four-fish-by-paul-greenberg/ http://roundvalleyfishing.com/2011/06/15/book-review-four-fi...
- senthil_rajasek 15y agoThis renders very well on my android phone. Thanks.
- Zarkonnen 15y agoSince mercury levels are obviously something people are very concerned about, I will look into adding them to the information. Does anyone have good sources for mercury levels of different kinds of fish?
- trotsky 15y agoWhy are various farmed fish listed as "not okay to eat"? Certainly farmed fish can't be under pressure like wild fish. Is it because of the environmental practices of the farms? I see us farmed raised catfish is listed ok, but apparently asian farmed catfish isn't?
- jkjeldgaard 15y agoMainly due to environmental strain and unethical practices. More info if you click the said fish.
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- sliverstorm 15y agoEnvironmental impact of the farms, and raising practices. You can grow catfish in awful waters and as they are bottom-feeders, basically feed them trash. Allegedly many Chinese catfish farms do just that.
- trotsky 15y agoThat makes sense, I just thought the website was only about sustainability of the populations based on some of the wording. I'm afraid to even look into the chinese catfish raising - wasn't there a recent scandal where asian catfish was being mass sold as US farm raised?
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- chrismealy 15y agoFarmed fish are often fed unsustainable fish! It's just laundering unsustainability.
- patja 15y agoFarmed salmon as a good choice? Think you better check that one out, unless it is in an inland pond (rare), farmed salmon is a pretty bad choice. Also having only a single listing for "cod" over-simplifies things. Many diverse fish are marketed as cod, and some of them are quite sustainable. Sablefish aka Black Cod from Alaska is a delicious buttery treat and quite sustainable.
- fishyfish 15y agoOne odd thing about this list: There are 6 instances where species are listed as okay to eat if they are from the US while not okay to eat if they are from elsewhere. There are 0 instances where the opposite is true. # yes Barramundi (US/Europe/Australia) # yes Barramundi (Closed Production) # no Barramundi (Other) # yes Catfish (US Farmed) # no Catfish (Other) # yes Crayfish (US) # no Crayfish (Other) # yes Herring (Norway, Iceland, North Sea, US) # no Herring (Other) # yes King Crab (US) # no King Crab (Other) # yes Northern Prawn/Pink Shrimp (US and Canadian) # no Northern Prawn/Pink Shrimp (Other) There seems to be some bias towards US fisheries in this list.
- Zarkonnen 15y agoYes, there is, due to a lot of the data being sourced from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, whose data is US-centric. If you look at the detail view of eg crayfish ( http://whichfish.org/detail/crayfish_us.html http://whichfish.org/detail/crayfish_us.html ), the issue is that the other sources have no data, so I had to use the likely overly US-centric view.
- zandor 15y agoWhich is a pretty big issue. Local sources matter. For example the King Crabs in the Barents Sea are really invasive and are spreading like wildfire. In Norway they are trying to hinder it's advancement and reducing it's population. Russia however, is currently more protective. After all they introduced them in the first place.
- anonymous246 15y agoNo, imho it's not bias. For wild fish, the US enforces the quantity of fish that can be taken much more effectively, than, say China/Japan. Second, the regulations/practices on the environmental impact of fish farms on the nearby sea are probably better in the US than elsewhere (many fish farms are in the backwaters of an ocean). Do you really find it hard to believe that the USA has higher standards of environmental protection than other countries?
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- code_duck 15y agoHow about everyone just leaves the ocean alone for a while? Eat jellyfish.
- DrStalker 15y agoAny list that opens with no: All Bottom Trawled Fish no: All Fish caught by Longline loses me right there. I don't know how different types of fish are caught, and I'm not going to reearch it before making each purchase.
- Aloisius 15y agoI don't where you buy your fish, but my fish counter has a fishmonger behind it who is eager to answer questions. Any good fishmonger will know when the fish came in, how the fish was caught and a good number of them will know if they are sustainable.
- alexjgough 15y agoBzzzzz. Sea bass is often really Antarctic toothfish, a species which, while certified as 'sustainable' is anything but. See http://www.lastocean.co.nz http://www.lastocean.co.nz for details on a campaign to protect the Ross Sea, one of the World's last almost untouched wild places.