Word: fishly
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...book Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappe argued more than 35 years ago that grain-fed cattle were essentially "reverse protein factories" because they required many more pounds of plant protein to produce a pound of flesh. Now there's a similar dynamic in the global fish farming, or aquaculture, industry - especially as it strains to satisfy consumers' voracious appetite for top-of-the-food chain, carnivorous fish, such as salmon, tuna and shrimp...
...seafood we eat nowadays comes from aquaculture; the $78 billion industry has grown 9% a year since 1975, making it the fastest-growing food group, and global demand has doubled since that time. Here's the catch: It takes a lot of input, in the form of other, lesser fish - also known as "reduction" or "trash" fish - to produce the kind of fish we prefer to eat directly. To create 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) of high-protein fishmeal, which is fed to farmed fish (along with fish oil, which also comes from other fish), it takes...
Industry and publicly funded research have significantly mitigated this inefficiency and reduced the percentage of fish and oil content in aqua-feed, replacing it with vegetable proteins and oils. "I would say cost, the sustainability of resources - pelagic fisheries - and human health concerns have been driving researchers to find replacements for fishmeal and fish oil - and we are doing this to the greatest extent possible," says Dr. David Higgs, a fish nutritionist for the Canadian government who works closely with British Columbia's $450 million salmon industry. (Reducing the fish content in feed also reduces the accumulation of PCBs...
There are other worrisome trends, such as the rapid expansion of other species now being farmed, which have much higher feed requirements. Ranched tuna, for instance, dine on live pelagic fish, such as anchovies, sardines and mackerel, but it takes about 20 kg (44 lbs.) of such feed to get 1 kg of tuna ready for a sushi bar near you. (Tuna are ranched - that is, corralled from the wild and then fed in anchored pens - because despite prodigious efforts, especially by the Japanese, no one has been able to raise tuna from eggs...
...problem is we've gone straight to the top. We are essentially, as some argue, farming tigers when we raise tuna or striped bass or cod," says Brian Halweil, a senior researcher with WorldWatch, a Washington-based environmental NGO. By contrast, the fish species at the core of the millennia-long tradition of fish-farming in Asia and parts of Africa - catfish, carp and milkfish - actually require less fish input than is ultimately harvested, because they are herbivorous or omnivorous. In Asia, the idea of feeding several times more fishmeal to get one pound back would seem sheer folly. "Ultimately...