Sustainable Seafood For People With Lobotomies

Mark Bittman writes in the New York Times today about a company in California that’s claiming to be selling “sustainable seafood.” The company, I Love Blue Sea, sells only seafood that’s found on neither the Greenpeace Red List nor the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. Those lists track seafood fished in an unsustainable manner, which usually means one of three things according to Greenpeace:

  • there’s little data proving fish stocks are heathly
  • seafood is being sourced from depleted stocks
  • or, fishing methods are destructive to other fish habitats

All of this makes sense, right? I can’t argue with eating seafood only from healthy fish stocks.

But … shipping that fish across the country, from California to my house in Massachusetts, can’t be good for the planet.

Buying two pounds of gulf shrimp ($23.14) and shipping it overnight using FedEx ($26.84) ends up costing $49.98. AND the cross country flight my shrimp makes will deposit about 2,500 pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I haven’t even figured the fuel cost for the flight.

Now, how sustainable is that seafood? I probably melted a glacier just to eat my two pounds of shrimp!

Photo by jpellgen and republished here under a Creative Commons license.