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.
Thanks 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!).
A 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).
Yes, 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.
I 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.
Why 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?
That's true for carnivorous fish like salmon, but an omnivore like catfish will eat pellets made of grain and produce meat at a 2 to 1 ratio, on par with poultry. It's a matter of the consumer being aware of the difference and being able to trust the labeling (and the implied farming practices).
Environmental 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.
That 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?
Farmed 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.
This 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.
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.
Most of the passing-off is good news from a sustainability perspective. The most common substitute fish are pollock and farmed tilapia, catfish and basa, all highly sustainable. Here in the UK, cod prices are so high that most fish and chip shop menus just list 'fish' where they once listed cod, the generic fish invariably being farmed basa. Most popular processed fish products like fish fingers, breaded fillets and fish pies are using pollock in place of cod or haddock.
The most sustainable fish are the cheapest. If we can move past our fetish for eating apex predators, we can easily solve fish sustainability without the need for regulation.
That'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.
>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).
Well, 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.
absent 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.
It depends probably but I'm sure some areas the name of different foods are imprecise.
Does caviar mean all fish eggs? all black fish eggs? Beluga, Ossetra or Sevruga sturgeon eggs? What about True cod. ect.
The linked article seems to indicate current efforts toward cheaper DNA sampling for use by government regulators. Handheld detectors might be a decade or two away as solid-state DNA chips come of age. I think all that is required is a population that demands a properly labeled and inspected food supply -- I'm bullish about the technology getting there.
Unfortunately, government action is also incredibly limited in what it can do. Tragedy of the commons - all it takes is a few nations that don't subscribe to whatever sustainable fishing agreement is devised, and fishers can fish unsustainably under their flag.
I just want to give a plug here for a very underrated & unknown newspaper; the Saint Petersburg Times. They did tests like this about 5 years ago with similar results, and I believe they were the first investigative reporters who looked into this issue.
Just as we should dismiss the police force because they are not 100% effective, they do not capture all murders and theives, and sometimes convict innocent people.
It would be a better argument if you could talk about the actual odds.
I'd say that the recent prominence of such lists, and articles, means that at least the general population is becoming somewhat aware of the issue. Without that, nothing much is likely to happen.
Perhaps it's difficult to assure you're being given what you're told, but at least people are starting to ask.
And when preservation such as fishing regulations are proposed, this will make sense to more people. Maybe all the more so when they realize that their individual decisions don't matter, aren't sufficient, because they're bing lied to.
Since 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?
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, 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 ), the issue is that the other sources have no data, so I had to use the likely overly US-centric view.
Which 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.
No, 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?
A fish doesn't care what country it was caught by. The US limits are surely set with the current population in mind... a population that is directly effected by what other countries are fishing. The more Japanese fish you eat, the less America fishes. It all evens out.
I 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.
I 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?"
Just for the record, fish consumption is linked to increased IQ in children because of the presence of Omega-3 Fatty Acids.
Did you know though that both Flaxseed and Walnuts are both better, cheaper, and less environmentally damaging sources of Omega 3s than fish? Soybeans and Tofu are also pretty good sources.
I'm cool with people consuming less, not merely abstaining from eating fish. But for those out there who are willing to (and there are many such people in the tech community), it really is the best option.
> increased IQ in children because of the presence of Omega-3 Fatty Acids. Did you know though that both Flaxseed and Walnuts are both better
The fatty acid in both Flaxseed and Walnuts you are referring to is alpha Linolic acid (ALA), whereas fish contains Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Out of these, only DHA is found in the brain. If DHA is not present in the diet, ALA can be converted into it, but only at an extremely low rate of efficiency [1]
The only reliable vegan source of DHA I am aware of is certain types of algae. Additionally, by consuming extremely large quantities of nuts you will typically be overloading your copper to zinc ratio.
ALA is adequately converted to DHA, you didn't read the article you linked. Studies on rats are far from conclusive... but then why claim it's a human-health fact?
"While there is discrepancy in ALA conversion rates in rats, these studies imply that dietary ALA could sufficiently supply the brain with DHA in the absence of exogenous DHA intake."
This is consistent with all other research I've read, debunking this myth has become a hobby.
>It is not enough to assume that ALA exerts effects through conversion to EPA and DHA, as the process is highly inefficient in humans.
>with higher levels of ALA, no net rise in the level of circulating DHA occurred [2,3]. For example, feeding 10.7 g/d of ALA from flaxseed oil for 4 weeks failed to increase low DHA levels in breast milk of lactating women [4]. Some estimate that only 5–10% and 2–5% of ALA in healthy adults is converted to EPA and DHA, respectively [5], while others suggest that humans convert less than 5% of ALA to EPA or DHA [6]. The International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids (ISSFAL) recently released an official statement on the conversion efficiency of ALA to DHA. They concluded that the conversion of ALA to DHA is on the order of 1% in infants"
Now let's examine the actual context of your quote:
>"While there is discrepancy in ALA conversion rates in rats, these studies imply that dietary ALA could sufficiently supply the brain with DHA in the absence of exogenous DHA intake. It is important to note that the hepatic DHA synthesis rates observed for rats do not extend to humans [44]. The higher rates reflect a more efficient ALA elongation process in mice and rats"
It specifically states that ALA->DHA is only a phenomena that occurs in rats and not humans.
>Studies on rats are far from conclusive... but then why claim it's a human-health fact?
Exactly my point. The human studies clearly state it is not reliably converted, and you are claiming it IS based on a rat study. The whole article I linked is based on the assumption it is NOT, and from the perspective that we should be examining the health benefits of ALA independently from the health benefits of fish oil.
Let me clarify: Inefficient conversion of dietary ALA to DHA is neither correlated nor causative to anything.
My point is that ALA provides adequate, not elevated levels of DHA, and there's no evidence to the contrary.
Now let's examine the actual context of my quote:
> ALA is adequately converted to DHA
I think it's worth mentioning where you make a false statement, directly after citing inefficient conversion rates in humans.
>It specifically states that ALA->DHA is only a phenomena that occurs in rats and not humans.
Which is it, inefficient or non-existent in humans?
This statement:
>It is not enough to assume that ALA exerts effects through conversion to EPA and DHA, as the process is highly inefficient in humans.
... Says exactly nothing about healthy levels of DHA. It is non sequitur. It skirts the issue, it avoids the topic, the statement tries to make a huge jump in unreasonable unproven logic. This paper shows nothing but the therapeutic effect of DHA/EPA on diseased people.
There is no evidence to suggest inadequate DHA is produced from dietary ALA in otherwise healthy humans. Not in this paper, nor any I've seen.
> Inefficient conversion of dietary ALA to DHA is neither correlated nor causative to anything
It's correlated with being a human, but the significance of very inefficient conversion versus trivial conversion is simply that it prevents us from claiming they are metabolically identical goods.
>Which is it, inefficient or non-existent in humans?
Inefficient. 'ALA->DHA' shorthand was meant to token the previous idea of "efficient endogenous ALA to DHA conversion" and not initialize a new false one.
>no evidence to suggest inadequate DHA
I think you're missing the point by intentionally or unintentionally rephrasing this in terms of avoiding a negative. Let me requote the initial context by jeremymims:
> Just for the record, fish consumption is linked to increased IQ in children because of the presence of Omega-3 Fatty Acids. Did you know though that both Flaxseed and Walnuts are both better, cheaper, and less environmentally damaging sources of Omega 3s than fish?
My primary point is that one cannot rationally assert that the numerous positive IQ benefits scientific literature attributes to consumption of fish and fish oil are somehow equally or better attributable to walnut and flax consumption. The evidence indicates differing methods of action and a need to consider their health benefits independently.
The 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.
Unfortunately, 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.
The Hawaii-based longline fishery for swordfish was closed in 2000 over concerns of excessive sea turtle by-catch. One consequence of the closure was that 70 Hawaii-based vessels were replaced by 1,500-1,700 longline vessels from various Asian nations
Even if the entire United States ceased eating fish, the problem would continue and get worse. Other countries would step in and eat the fish we would have been eating.
In other words, the way to solve the problem is not by not eating fish (though that is perfectly fine at an individual level) but to establish sustainability around the globe.
I 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.
I'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.
There 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.
I 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"?
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.
Bzzzzz. Sea bass is often really Antarctic toothfish, a species which, while certified as 'sustainable' is anything but. See 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.
Can'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.
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
Wait, what? You are going off the deep end here. I assure you that the exact opposite is true - practically all mass produced produce touches soil and uses real sunlight. The economics don't support your premise at all. Have you never been to rural areas? I assure you they are not lined with industrial warehouses and artificial lighting systems.
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.
At some level you need to take on a certain amount of responsibility. My locally grown produce mostly comes from people I know. They don't need a ton of regulations and inspections to keep me safe - social contracts do. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years. The regulations and inspections mostly became needed when you got so far removed from your food source. Also life isn't 100.00% safe, c'est la vie.
"Have you never been to rural areas? I assure you they are not lined with industrial warehouses and artificial lighting systems."
You are aware that Farmville != rural areas in the real world? There are movies and books depicting the industrial rising of cattle (for example "Eating Animals" does a nice, graphics job). You can spot the "pink lakes" which result from the waste output of industrial pig farming on Google Maps. But these are indeed not the areas you would visit on a weekend trip to the countryside, because these areas reek for miles.
Just because some chickens still roam outside, doesn't prove that the majority of them does.
The article about pig farming was on HN years ago, but I can't find it atm. But Google provides a lot of info "factory farming".
The things you are saying are true about livestock. The commenters above are talking about fruits and vegetables specifically.
It makes sense to me that a dirt patch and sunlight out in Ohio are cheaper than setting up hydroponics plants.
This might apply more here in Europe than in the USA, considering you have such an abundance of land available. But our cheaper vegetables are notoriously grown in glasshouses in the Netherlands and Spain over here and they do not touch any real soil; and it is ultimately cheaper and allows for better use of the space since they can grow on several levels and harvesting is much easier than having to dig something in and later out in the field.
The worse part still remains: chemicals, pesticides and lots and lots of genetically altered vegetables and fruits. You cannot even use their seeds to grow new ones; you have to buy seeds from e.g. Monsanto each year along with all the chemicals you need to grow that stuff.
Well, even with local farmers you do not escape the mass food production industry, really. AFAIK there are hardly any farmers left who do NOT grow their vegetables and fruits with actual, natural seeds but rely on those genetically modified super-seeds from Monsanto and other companies. These do not bear usable seeds, you cannot plant them in the next year. Plus they need all sorts of chemicals and pesticides to grow, still.
> We've been doing it this way for thousands of years
And for the bigger part of those thousands of years, on average we barely made it to the age of 30, let alone 40. It is good if you can trust local folk but it is better to have professional inspections because there is a lot that can still go wrong in farming and your local farmers might just miss or not know about something crucial. Or maybe I am just used too much to the German way of things already.... inspections and checks for everything.
Just to give you a picture, I get most of my vegetables from a Community Supported Agriculture farm here in the spring and summer. They give me a box of what is available. Onions, peppers, beets, potatoes, cucumbers, fennel, tomatoes, garlic and cilantro have been some of the recent arrivals. Spring had lots of lettuces and spinach, in the future there will be squash. Some are local heirlooms, they certainly aren't from gene hack labs. The jalapenos growing in my garden came from Amish farm stocks in the next county. The pork chops and sausage in my freezer grew up a few miles away.
With all that said, I could be at the white house for a state dinner in an hour if they ever asked me.
I don't know how possible it is to manage a large global society this way, but it works OK at a micro level.
Is Germany really that different? Here in the US I can just go to a farmer's market and get all kinds of heirloom vegetables or just veggies that are hard to find commercially because they don't do well at large scale. Further, there are large farms that only sell tomatoes to supermarkets within a limited radius because that way they can be guaranteed picked when ripe since they don't have to ship cross-country.
The demand for tasty fresh food is there and in true capitalist spirit, farmers are rising to the occasion ;-)
For 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.
> Why does all broccoli look the same? Surely pre-industry, there were numerous varieties of broccoli.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not. If you are sincere then you are mistaken beyond your wildest dreams. All cultivars of the broccoli species look magnificently different.
Broccoli, kale, collard greens, Chinese broccoli, cauliflower, Romanesco broccoli and broccoflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi are all different cultivars within the same species: Brassica oleracea.
Right. It was just a randomly chosen example. Perhaps it was a poor one.
I'm aware of the size of the Brassica genus and the B. oleracea species in particular. I was not, however, trying to make the point that B. oleracea is a species without a lot of variety.
I was trying to make the point that the food industry consistently simplifies the genetic variety of foods, sometimes alarmingly so. Bananas are definitely a better example.
And like any "industry" there are niche providers that specialize in different areas. This is where Community Supported Agriculture, farmer's markets, and supporting your local farms comes into play.
You don't have to buy all your vegetables and fruits at the convenience store or local supermarket. It may be easier, but in that case you're exchanging variety for convenience, so don't be surprised at the result.
The impact of industrial agriculture can't be undone simply by buying from local farms. It can be mitigated, but mitigated does not equal undone.
If I buy my produce from a local farm whose soil is full of run-off from an industrial farm upstream, I'm still being impacted by industrial agriculture. If my local farm only has one type of banana because industrial agriculture has killed all the other ones (this is a metaphor, not reality), then I'm still being impacted by industrial agriculture. If I cook my locally grown produce with water polluted by industrial farms, I'm still being impacted by industrial agriculture.
Riding your bike to work doesn't make you immune to the impacts of climate change. Neither does buying locally grown produce make you immune to the impacts of industrial agriculture.
There was an interesting read on HN not too long ago about the "biggest mistake" of humanity... and it was settling down and growing crops instead of hunting and gathering which allegedly made life easier but according to the article it actually made things much worse in terms of health, time invested in order not-to-starve and a big point were monocultures: humans feed on hardly any diversity which can lead to all sorts of malnourishment and they found proof of that in lots of bones from ancient civilizations after their culture had moved to farming.
Upvoted for mentioning FSM, in acronym form, and not providing any type of explanation. This implies an expectation that FSM is common enough knowledge at this point. I wonder how many people just skipped over it. Surprisingly, a google search of "fsm" actually brings up the relevant page in the first search result, beating out the wikipedia page for Finite State Machine.
Sustainability and local product seem to be a big movement in the restaurant industry. Problem is, its only high-end or smaller restaurants. So as long as there's a dollar menu at McDonalds, industrial farms and bio-engineered pesticide-ridden fruits and veggies will be prevalent.
[1] http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_i...