The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.
You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.
PRC fishing mostly on international waters is an act of war now? NVM PRC DWF about as well behaved as other distant fishing fleet in terms of clipping EEZs and they're still underfishing per capita relative other large fishing powers, i.e. they're taking less from commons then entitled.
Countries dependent are migratory transnational resource extraction are frankly living on a retarded business model and have only themselves to blame. Reminder 80% of PRC fish comes from sustainable aquaculture that control in their soveign waters. That's your sustainable ecology model, but it requires capex / infra to manage husbandry instead relying on gaia like some hunter gather.
Because they are different goods that can't be aquacultured locally. Because PRC fisherman gets to make a living selling higher value wild fish like everyone else. Because it's simply not a problem when PRC decides to fish in international waters, again like everyone else, all of whom are similarly poorly behaved, i.e. SKR, JP, TW, ES... but you know 3/4 of those are US partners vs PRC, so they don't get the smear campaign.
Good thing it's not their food then. Again most of fishing done legally in high seas, international waters, where commercial fishing at industrial scales now sufficient to alter coastal state ecology. And that sucks for them. But UNCLOS gave these fishing states 200nm which is fuckload more area historic fishing practices need. Meanwhile PRC, one of the largest countries with the smallest coastal entitlement / EEZs due to regional geography means they have to fish on high seas for proportional access. That's baked into UNCLOS, coastal states gets to milk their EEZ, everyone else gets access to the commons. If someone wants to start a war over that, they can, but let's not pretend they'd be anything but pirates, because DWF pillaging he commons is both legally allowed and intended.
The edge of EEZs, aka the high seas, aka fucking international waters. There's lots of documentation of PRC DWF legally fishing where they're entitled that useful idiots think is illegal activity because US was pumping propaganda bux and generating false narratives / wedge issues countries PRC was cozying up with and rationalize deploying their coast guards to undermine PRC interests.
There's occasionally misbehavior, i.e. AIS shenanigans for incursions from minority of vessels, but PRC bheavior proportionally is slightly BETTER than other DWFs, i.e. SKR, TW, ES. TLDR if an a countries entire extract model falls because some foreign vessels pops a few nautical miles into 200 mile long EEZ, i.e. a few % of occasional incursion, then their national fishing managment models are not sustainable.
BTW, there's a reason only few ships are ever interdicted, because in aggregate, PRC DWF is just not a fucking issue. There were actual attemps where US coast guards tried to board PRC DWF fleets on high seas, again, international waters, and was lolled off. So the answer to all those asking why DWF fleets aren't sunk (I assume in good faith they mean all DWF and not just PRC's), the answer is simple: most operate legally, in international waters, pillaging the commons unsustainably as they are entitled to.
There are studies of AIS disabling events, highest proportion of ships/time. IIRC, avg worst is Spain, ~15% obscure. Then US, ~8%, then TW ~5% then PRC slightly less. US gets pass since US fishing happens in North West Atlantic - US has big EEZ. Not much info on SKR/JP (other biggest DWF) except they tend to fish where PRC fishes and do all your slave labour that other DWF does, so hard to believe they don't do AIS shenanigans. IIRC worse (by type) absolute was JP for tuna longliner. There's other consideration that DWF has global players interacting, i.e. JP doesn't do destructive trawling, but they run big transhipment reefers (fridge boat) to support to fish longer.
MSM will focus almost exclusively PRC. It's spiked narrative. TLDR, go track "research" on PRC DWF since ~2020 when the champaign started. The estimate of PRC DWF by west aligned research... laundered by western news went from something like 3000 to 6000 (reasonable), to 10000 to 18000... in 5 years. Meanwhile PRC wild catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons, i.e. PRC somehow built ~30000 new fishing ships in 5 years, 950% increase... only to fish 25% more. It's all stupid all the time.
Where's the whataboutism? It is, in fact, super dooper helpful to remind people that US lawfare/propaganda has it's limits and in many domains, geopolitical reality has a PRC bias. Maybe it'll help some people understand why reeeing about US narratives against PRC keeps being futile.
It is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
Yeah, the only real solution is to eliminate commons.
In case of the ocean I would say that every country should have the economic right to all points in the ocean closer to them than to any other country. Everyone else gets free passage (subject to your reasonable environmental laws) and to engage in scientific operations, but only the country has any right to remove anything beyond scientific samples.
It's not perfect given that some species move about, but it would go a long ways towards controlling the problem.
What you’re describing is different from what the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is doing. They’re essentially strip mining the ocean thousands of miles away from China, leaving the locals to deal with the ecological damage and resulting consequences.
Different and the same. What's the same is that it is a shared resource that people benefit privately from and there is no authority that can manage it globally. Like I say, those fish the Chinese caught are real, people are not sure what the long term consequences are.
Sink boats until the behavior changes. Behavior won't change until a sufficient number of boats sink. Decades of talking and explaining and diplomacy and politics have failed. The only two options remaining are accepting the status quo or sinking boats. Anything else is performative.
I dunno, drones and missiles are probably the most cost effective way. I was in favor of diplomacy 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, but I'm completely and totally done pretending diplomacy and education and hearts and minds type campaigns have any value, anymore.
I also think it's worth going to war over. The threat of killing the oceans is a pretty drastic and permanent threat to the entire world, and it can cascade into apocalyptic conditions.
Having a coherent frame of rules that allow conservation actually increases the fish yield, but China's treating it like a zero sum game. It's gotta be stopped, since they're entirely and brazenly unwilling to stop. The same drones used against the venezuelan drug boats could be targeted at the exploitative fishing boats, and a consistent year or two could force international agreements and some sort of collaborative enforcement. Drone platforms and satellite monitoring could even make it mostly autonomous.
This is so delusional and siloed from current geopolitical realities. This will lead to war and/or sanctions by China on multiple exports and imports with the offending countries.
I thought there were fairly large blackfly farming operations for fish feeding. maybe for non-ocean species? As with a lot of operational farming practices- it's probably a lot more complex than a few articles could easily encompass.
Yes, that's the species I was recalling. There were some issues with occasional accidental releases, but other than that, they seemed like a nice process.
A friend of mine has been working on a company[1] that does exactly this: they sit on the waste stream of large agricultural processing plants and use black soldier flies to convert that waste into protein for aquaculture (and fertilizer).
My notion of how to address the feed supply issue is:
1. Black Soldier Flies
2. Duckweed
3. Algae (Omega 3s)
All of the above are strong protein sources and duckweed and algae are fast growers and high density producers (at least an order of magnitude more than soybeans).
Obviously more effort is required to farm them but with automation it should require minimal labor.
> Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish.
If something like this works, it has the double benefit of pulling carbon from the air/water and turning all of the matter into food. With typical plants we grow on land, (generally) most of the plant isn't consumed so whatever carbon it stored is a waste product. In some countries, that waste is just burned and sent back into the atmosphere. But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
> But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
I'm not sure it helps at all regarding co2, you'll shit it and breath it out in a matter of days... co2 is only a problem when you burn fossil fuels, because you reintroduce millions years of deposit back in the atmosphere in a very short period of time. That's why things like burning wood aren't a big deal other than localised pollution
There are countless carbon sinks within the ocean. It finds its way into the shells of creatures (calcium carbonate) and hangs around for a very long time in solid form. And lots of creatures die/defecate, that sinks to the bottom of the sea, and much of the carbon there doesn't rise back up since not all of it is consumed.
And when you're spreading seaweed over a fish farm, a good chunk of that is flowing back out into the ocean and contributing to the cycle of carbon deposits.
By avoiding fishing, you stop damaging many of the carbon sink systems in the ocean, and so as a second-order effect improve the sinks we used to have.
Shitting it will not release it into the air. Maybe a small percentage, depending on it's circuit in nature. But yes, your point about the CO2 circuit stands.
Side note - it always amazes me (and people when I tell them) that when you lose fat from your body, they main way for that fat to leave your system, is to burn it then breathe the co2 out - that is one of the limits on how much fat you can burn a day. You do lose some of the results of the burning, and a little through sweat, but the vast majority is down to co2 leaving your system.
(Note you can temporarily also lose weight through water loss - but that isn't the loss of actual fat from your system.)
Over time it would gradually remove CO2 since not all of it goes back, but stuff like this isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of CO2 we'd need to remove.
Planting billions and billions of trees would pull a lot more, but still would only make a small dent. Greening large desert regions with large scale water and local climate engineering projects, ocean seeding, etc. would also pull more but still only make a dent.
Unfortunately this pithy comment is inconsistent with the science. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Most of the emissions from beef comes from negative land-use change, that is the loss of carbon-sequestering life that existed in the land for both the cows and the tons of agricultural food they eat, and methane, which is released directly to our atmosphere and is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Fortunately, if we were to phase out cattle, this methane has a half-life much shorter than CO2 and would provide important early gains in restabilizing our climate.
Cos can be grass fed. Most of the beef I have ever eaten is predominantly grass fed.
In many places cows are a natural part of the ecosystem. So much so that in rewilding parts of Scotland they have ended up releasing cattle into the wild.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
Sure large herbivores were and still are part of many ecosystems.
But around where I live the majority of the grass for the grass-fed cows doesn't come from anything remotely resembling a rich ecosystem. The grass is literally 'grass': maybe one or 2 types of grass, similar amount of herbs, funghi. Hardly any insects except for flies attracted to manure. These used to be ecosystems with > 20 species of grassses and herbs per square meter.
And these are even relatively small farms; trying to upscale it beyond that to make it possible for millions of humans to eat meat multiple times a week, it won't get any better. If you're putting large amounts of cows in a much much smaller habitat then what they'd naturally use, then it's not the same ecosystem anymore.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
tldr; yes, but only if you want to feed a couple of people from it.
More, per the below lifecycle assesment study: "There was little variability between production scenarios except for the grassfed, where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 37% higher due to a longer finishing time and lower finishing weight"
That link shows that twice as many emissions are attributed to farm stage vs land use change. And fta: "Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers and the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle."
So not sure there is much for me to respond to you given that.
They always start with a false equivalency anyway, comparing stuff like cane sugar with cow meat, that's just extra dumb.
I don't have proper calculation, but when you add up all the processing and extra requirement to grow high protein crops, you are actually not very far from meat cost.
Which makes sense because if meat was so inefficient, then vegetal protein replacement should be much cheaper, but they are not.
he's saying the plant breathes the CO2 then turns it into food, then you feed that food to the fish instead of other fish, putting the carbon back into the life cycle
and the earth probably did turn into an ice ball millions of years ago
Nope, it does not pull any carbon dioxide from air/water.
The oil with omega-3 acids is not produced from any algae, but from cultures of special strains of Schizochytrium.
Schizochytrium is a fungus-like organism (not related to true fungi). It is called "algae" in marketing language, because "Schizochytrium" or "Stramenopiles" are words unknown to the general population and because "algae" sounds more appealing to the rich vegans who have afforded to pay the high prices under which this oil has been sold for many years.
In any case, this does not matter much. Long-chain omega-3 are an essential fish food ingredient, but by mass they are a small fraction of fish food. Much more can be gained regarding carbon dioxide by using for the fish food a mixture of vegetable proteins that have been preprocessed to enable their digestion by fish.
Schyzochytrium has enabled the production of long-chain omega-3 acids without capturing small fish or krill for a few decades, but in the past the cost of Schyzochytrium oil was too high.
In order to be used as an ingredient in farmed fish food the cost of Schizochytrium oil had to be decreased a lot.
It appears that at least Veramaris has succeeded to do this, but unfortunately such progresses have not become visible yet in the retail price of Schizochytrium oil for human consumption.
A decade ago, Schizochytrium oil was 8 to 10 times more expensive than fish oil. Then its price has decreased, so that 4 or 5 years ago it already was only 3 times more expensive than fish oil.
Unfortunately, after that there were no further price reductions, so today the retail price of Schizochytrium oil is about the same as 5 years ago.
If the production cost of Schizochytrium oil has really diminished, as said in the parent article (because it cannot be used in fish food, unless it is cheaper than fish oil), then the producers have now increased profits, without decreasing the retail price. Of course, like always, it is not certain that this is really the winning strategy for them, because there may be many others like me, who wait for a reduction in the price of Schizochytrium oil in order to switch to it from fish oil, so keeping this inflated price may result in a much lower sales volume than with a smaller price.
Moreover, for whoever wants to consume vegan oil with long-chain omega-3 acids, there is an additional trap with Schizochytrium oil. The original Schizochytrium oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil (i.e. around 2 grams of omega-3 acids per 5 mL of oil), but there are many sellers who sell diluted oil at the same price like the sellers who sell non-diluted oil. Thus the true price of long-chain omega-3 acids from the sellers of diluted oil may be 10 to 20 times higher than from fish oil. Therefore when buying omega-3 capsules or bottled Schizochytrium oil one must read carefully the fine print and compute the price per gram of DHA+EPA, in order to be sure that the price is right.
To clarify for other readers... The point about "Schizochytrium is not algae" is that they do not photosynthesize and thus don't create sugars from CO2. Rather, this organism is a heterotroph and consumes various organic molecules from its environment. Industrial cultures are fed simple sugars and nitrogen sources, plus waste products like spent brewery yeast, cheese whey, and molasses.
Depending on the feed producer. The farmed fish feed that is considered the very best quality has about 50% fished fish in it (and hence has the natural omega3 in it). The other 50% is mostly soy and wheet, but also misc other stuff like flavor enhancers. Low quality feed is mostly land based.
I thought it was a way to make the silly character look pretentious and pseudo intellectual, but misremembered. It appears that it was actually a way for the character to narcissistically draw attention.
I've been taking algae supplements lately. It tastes like fish food because it is fish food.
Apparently, it was a source of cheap protein during wars, but didn't provide enough nutrients and tastes like pond scum. It ended up in the supplement sector because it was easier to get approved as it over food. Soylent Green was inspired by it.
I hope it does go back into the fish food sector - it's cheap and nutritious but tastes worse than soy.
There is a certification group called Best Aquaculture Practices[0] that sets standards for hatcheries, farms, feed mills, and processing plants regarding sustainability and quality. They've got a new feed mill standard[1] but it seems like it gives feed mills a few years to come into compliance to use sustainable fishmeal and fish oil.
There are some exciting (or terrifying depending on your perspective) developments in the “lab grown/cultivated” space. I had a chance to have some WildType salmon the other day. The costs are still way above wild caught or farmed salmon, but if they can get the price down and improve the texture I could see these cultivated meats really taking off.
I'm curious what they use to provide food for the lab grown salmon cells. They need all the same nutrients but even more precisely formulated since there isn't a digestive system.
It seems like it will have the same problem with inputs or perhaps even worse. This is one of the reasons I'm still skeptical about lab grown meat taking off.
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy are against farming any kind of sea food and taking away krill or seaweed from oceans. Oceans are already devastated by overfishing
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy like to say what we shouldn't do, but they're usually overidealistic, and hardly ever suggest what we should do instead. Not eating seafood is just not a realistic expectation.
We are going to end up without seafood eventually anyhow. There's no good solution, global fisheries will continue their collapse as long as we lean on them.
Of course it is. You just don't like the expectation. What we should do is eat waaay less meat and seafood. It takes less land, water, and outside calories to product veggies and beans over meat and fish. Obviously this is not a reality for many people on the planet but it also is a reality for many people on the planet who just choose not to do it.
This is the website of a shrimp farm in the interior of Spain. Some years working now. They do not taste like wild but they are ok. https://norayseafood.es/en/
Are those Macrobrachium? The freshwater river prawn? I can't find anything on the site, but I doubt they're doing the world's largest saltwater aquarium...
Unless the grow multiple species, it's pacific white shrimp [1] which seems to be a salt water species. Also the pictures do not look like Marcobrachium
Wonder if that means they're just using stock photos of shrimp. The other guy wasn't lying when he said "interior", it's about as far from the sea in Spain as seems possible. I thought all the non-coastal fish-farming ops were doing freshwater species.
This just reminds me of Louisiana oyster farmers in the US fighting against coastal restoration[1]. Part of me is convinced they are happier having more of our state erode away which will create more oyster farm beds.
But oysters are really not good. It tastes weird with too strong a note of salty water and has a pretty bad texture that makes masticating unenjoyable.
They are poor man's food that got super expensive with clever marketing and supply management (and since they need to be alive the supply chain is extremely complicated and expensive, you can't store them for long).
If you live near a sea and can get them dirt cheap why not, but if you live far into the land, they are mostly a waste of good money and a way for pretentious people to appear fancy/rich at the Christmas holiday.
There are lots of ways to cook oysters, which significantly lessens the briny taste and gelatinous texture.
While it's true that their rise in the West was mostly from clever marketing, oysters are just considered normal seafood in many countries and are cooked into dishes.
But yes, the premium price due to the raw oyster trend makes it not worth it if you live far away from the sea.
The article reads as if nobody has considered farming anchovies, sardines, anchovetta, and other feed fish. We farm land crops for land herbivores. It seems we could feed some sea herbivores and omnivores with plants, and feed some of those to sea carnivores and omnivores.
For me, the considerable environmental issues aside, the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
Take salmon for instance. In a lifetime of preparing and then eating several portions of salmon per week, I've noticed that the farmed salmon are pretty much always:
-Very pale pink color, as though the animal was unhealthy (sometimes stores even add red food dye to cover this up)
-Weak and mushy flesh, even when fresh; healthy salmon flesh is muscled and springy, it isn't naturally slimy and it holds its shape
-Weak flavor that seems to be missing a lot of the more robust flavor notes entirely
-Thinner or nearly-nonexistent layer of fat between the flesh and the scales (contributes to less flavor overall and removes a lot of the umami); the same problem also applies to the thin bands of fat between the rows of muscle in the filet itself
-Skin/scales slightly disintegrate or fleck away at a touch instead of remaining intact
I don't even bother buying it even if it's significantly cheaper.
I can't imagine that the nutrient content is the same as the wild-caught fish. And based on the sickly look and taste of the meat, it's also very hard to believe that the farmed fish live a life that they find to be pleasant, to the extent such a thing is possible.
Wild-caught salmon is pink because of the krill they eat, so in a way it’s also a dye. Farmed salmon definitely has coloring added to get this effect, but otherwise the flesh itself isn’t naturally pink.
I eat plenty of farmed salmon (Atlantic salmon) because they are the default in grocery stores here and the few times I went out of my way to buy wild caught salmon I find that they are way worse. The first time I bought sockeye salmon not king salmon which was not fatty at all. The second time I bought king salmon shipped straight from Alaska and the flavor still disappointed. It's everything you say about farmed salmon: weak flesh, weak flavor, pale pink color. I'm starting to think I was scammed.
> the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
I eat wild-caught salmon every day (as part of https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet) and can totally confirm this. Farmed salmon's taste is very off-putting. I noticed this only after switching to wild salmon for a few weeks.
Arctic char and trout tend to taste more like their wild counterparts than salmon since they're raised on smaller, less industrialized farms. Many restaurants actually prefer Ora King salmon over regular king salmon due to the consistency.
A nice steamed white fish is pretty indistinguishable for me. But again I'm not a fresh fish enthusiast, and ultimately aquaculture makes adequate inputs for fish products like fish balls or fish pattys.
Greenhouse gas emissions shouldn't be the only factor people consider for sustainability of their food. In the case of fish, this very article talks about the issues with farmed fish. Even a plant-based diet can be filled with unsustainable sources, such as plantations that destroy endangered habitats for palm oil, or industrial farming operations that spray lots of pesticides to harm the insect population and allow lots of fertilizer runoff into natural waterways. We're still polluting and depleting resources for many many vegetarian foods in the world.
I'd argue that if we're looking for a full top-to-bottom sustainable food system, animals will play a role. But we need to be cognizant of the whole system, not playing whack-a-mole with issues.
According to your source, there are 15 sources of protein that emit less greenhouse gases (GHGs) per 100g of protein than farmed fish, including poultry and eggs, and 16 sources that emit more (including items that are not known for their protein content like coffee, apples, and dark chocolate). Being highly charitable, farmed fish is squarely in the middle.
Additionally, farmed fish emits twice the GHGs of tofu, and almost 22 times that of nuts. So just comparing placements on the list paints a misleading picture.
As for "not willing to go full vegetarian": you may as well say "not willing to stop eating fish", because they are equally unserious limitations when discussing these topics. "Not being willing" is only a slightly more mature version of a child saying "I don't want to".
I don't think it's "unserious" to recognize that >85% of the world's population eats meat.
If you're quibbling about wording, all I meant was: farmed fish and chicken are among the most sustainable meat sources.
I'm not making a statement that people should eat meat, but many people do eat meat, so it's worth comparing which meat sources are better than others. I think it would be great if more people knew that beef produces 10x the greenhouse gases than chicken/fish do.
It's not "quibbling" to correct your mischaracterization of the truth.
If you'll forgive me borrowing your logic: "I'm not saying that people should eat beef, but many people do eat beef, so it's worth comparing which beef sources are better than others."
Plant-based diets are a very good answer to the problems caused by animal agriculture. If someone takes issue with that answer, I'd need a better reason than their personal pleasure to take them seriously in the conversation.
I agree it’s worth comparing beef sources! That was my point about within-category differences and harm reduction. Saying "tofu is cleaner" doesn’t make beef comparisons pointless - just like the existence of bicycles doesn’t make car fuel economy comparisons pointless. We should compare across categories and within them, so people who aren’t switching today still choose the lower-impact option.
Farmed seafood is among the worst garbage you can eat. Tons of antibiotics, growth hormones, fish are fed utter cheap junk so ie salmon meat has more like pork composition than a wild salmon, shrimp are even worse. If you ever saw a shrimp 'factory' and grow pond/cage and its surroundings in a typical 3rd world country where most come from, you wouldn't eat it for a long time if ever again. Literally nothing lives around those places.
That take’s outdated. In the US/EU, routine antibiotics in fish farming are banned [1]. Growth hormones aren’t used in edible fish. Farmed salmon’s feed changed (more plant oils), but it still delivers high omega-3s and usually less mercury than wild [2].
OK thats a good development. But overall difference in quality of meat is even visible - farmed salmon looks like a completely different fish than wild one (if you even can get one) - akin to difference between say boar and domesticated pig (lean muscle vs tons of fatty wobbly tissue). It doesn't scream 'healthy' but that may be just emotions playing old tune.
Also what I wrote about shrimp from any 3rd world country is valid - I've seen such place this summer in Indonesia, and from what I've heard whole south east Asia is exactly like that, or worse. Getting shrimp from some western democracy with strong consumer protection rights ain't possible in many parts of Europe, not sure about other places
As much as I like salmon and the occasional flounder, my life would not be any worse if I had to stick to sprats (smoked sprats are delicious), sardines, anchovies and whatever else is a lower trophic level.
And you don't have to worry about mercury as a bonus.
Probably because just easier to catch a predatory fish than a land predator
Throw a line in the pond, whatever bites will bite. Clean it and you've got dinner.
Versus with hunting, historically (and even now) if you miss your shot or don't hit a part that immediately takes it down, now you've got an angry wolf/bear/moose bearing down on you. Wolf is also probably too close to dog for most cultures.
Nowadays you can get meat from bear/moose/whatever, but there isn't much of a culinary tradition associated with them. So the only people out for them are the curious or macho types
I have a redneck-y enough background to have eaten some predators. The meat doesn't taste as good. A lot of it is tougher or stringier. I think pigs are omnivores though, but I don't know what they are fed on farms.
Yes that's the issue with predators, since they run around and use their muscles a lot, the meat is lean and quite hard; it doesn't make for a very tasty meal and the effort required to get this type of meal really isn't warranted.
On top of that, you can't really farm predators, almost by definition (I'm sure you could but that would be very stupid).
Pigs are omnivores, so they can be fed vegetables or even food leftovers. Grandpa raised a couple of small pigs, they ate corn mixed with vegetable scraps from the kitchen. The pigs got slaughtered and the meat was delicious.
I expect it has something to do with muscle and fat composition and the physical requirements of predating on land vs. in water. A followup question would be what about water-based mammal predators like seals and whales? And what about water-based herbivores like beavers? Can't say how it tastes personally.
Maybe because fish predators are still fish? So they still taste like fish. It seems fish-eating birds taste fishy, which is not really a desirable flavor in a bird. Maybe mammal predators are also not as tasty - then also what do you feed a farmed bear or a fox, they need to eat meat... So you'd feed them cows that we could eat ourselves? Or we raise rabbits just for them?
From a practical matter, most fish in the ocean feed on other marine life. herbivorous and omnivorous fish do exist but they are a bit more rare, and it is more common for smaller/juvenile fish. Also even among those that are primarily herbivorous, they usually go after eggs or very small fish which makes them omnivorous.
The most common fish that we eat are those that other fish also eat, like herring, and there aren't a good comparable land based animal in our current diet. It would be a bit like if a primary diet for humans would be wild rodents.
One reason could be that fish like herring schools, but wild rodents don't. It is easier to hunt large quantity of animals if they are located in the same location and bunched up.
We're mammal predators too. Mammal herbivores travel in herd and are pretty easy to hunt. They also pose little risk. The answer is the same as to why lions don't have leopards as their main food source.
I assume it's because there aren't enough of them and they're relatively difficult to hunt/farm. Otherwise I'd be happily chowing down on lions and polar bears.
The taste difference isn't from muscle size. Predator flesh tends to be darker, coarser and gamey from high nitrogenous waste and lipid oxidation. Carnivore diets include secondary compounds like amines and fatty acid derivatives that add strong odors. Prey animals have a milder, sweeter flavor and tender texture due to lower metabolic by-products and more stable lipids. Slow twitch flesh tastes better than fast twitch flesh.
The article mentions black soldier fly larva which is good for fish like trout that naturally eat insects. However fish higher on the chain need to eat bait fish, and replacing those is more difficult.
Black soldier fly larva seems pretty simple to farm using organic waste too. Lots of backyard chicken keepers make simple grow boxes for them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbzedftrQJw
> My other advice is a one-size-fits-all food equation, which is, simply, to know where it came from. If you can't place it, trace it, or grow it/raise it/catch it yourself, don't eat it. Eat aware. Know your food. Don't wait on waiters or institutions to come up with ways to publicize it, meet your small fishmonger and chat him or her up at the farmer's market yourself.
I always find it super weird that people will eat soy bean products over, say, meat or cream when they’ve never seen a soy bean plant in their whole lives.
The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.
You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.
PRC fishing mostly on international waters is an act of war now? NVM PRC DWF about as well behaved as other distant fishing fleet in terms of clipping EEZs and they're still underfishing per capita relative other large fishing powers, i.e. they're taking less from commons then entitled.
Countries dependent are migratory transnational resource extraction are frankly living on a retarded business model and have only themselves to blame. Reminder 80% of PRC fish comes from sustainable aquaculture that control in their soveign waters. That's your sustainable ecology model, but it requires capex / infra to manage husbandry instead relying on gaia like some hunter gather.
If they can get to 80% locally, why not 100%. Why go to thousands of km away to get the 20%?
Because they are different goods that can't be aquacultured locally. Because PRC fisherman gets to make a living selling higher value wild fish like everyone else. Because it's simply not a problem when PRC decides to fish in international waters, again like everyone else, all of whom are similarly poorly behaved, i.e. SKR, JP, TW, ES... but you know 3/4 of those are US partners vs PRC, so they don't get the smear campaign.
When someone is eating the food that you and your children need to eat, you should probably consider that an act of war.
Good thing it's not their food then. Again most of fishing done legally in high seas, international waters, where commercial fishing at industrial scales now sufficient to alter coastal state ecology. And that sucks for them. But UNCLOS gave these fishing states 200nm which is fuckload more area historic fishing practices need. Meanwhile PRC, one of the largest countries with the smallest coastal entitlement / EEZs due to regional geography means they have to fish on high seas for proportional access. That's baked into UNCLOS, coastal states gets to milk their EEZ, everyone else gets access to the commons. If someone wants to start a war over that, they can, but let's not pretend they'd be anything but pirates, because DWF pillaging he commons is both legally allowed and intended.
That's absolute bs. There's documented videos of basically armadas fishing up to the very edge of Argentina's territorial waters.
>very edge of Argentina's territorial waters
The edge of EEZs, aka the high seas, aka fucking international waters. There's lots of documentation of PRC DWF legally fishing where they're entitled that useful idiots think is illegal activity because US was pumping propaganda bux and generating false narratives / wedge issues countries PRC was cozying up with and rationalize deploying their coast guards to undermine PRC interests.
There's occasionally misbehavior, i.e. AIS shenanigans for incursions from minority of vessels, but PRC bheavior proportionally is slightly BETTER than other DWFs, i.e. SKR, TW, ES. TLDR if an a countries entire extract model falls because some foreign vessels pops a few nautical miles into 200 mile long EEZ, i.e. a few % of occasional incursion, then their national fishing managment models are not sustainable.
BTW, there's a reason only few ships are ever interdicted, because in aggregate, PRC DWF is just not a fucking issue. There were actual attemps where US coast guards tried to board PRC DWF fleets on high seas, again, international waters, and was lolled off. So the answer to all those asking why DWF fleets aren't sunk (I assume in good faith they mean all DWF and not just PRC's), the answer is simple: most operate legally, in international waters, pillaging the commons unsustainably as they are entitled to.
What about the Chinese ships turning off their transponders? The news says its an ongoing problem dominated by one country.
There are studies of AIS disabling events, highest proportion of ships/time. IIRC, avg worst is Spain, ~15% obscure. Then US, ~8%, then TW ~5% then PRC slightly less. US gets pass since US fishing happens in North West Atlantic - US has big EEZ. Not much info on SKR/JP (other biggest DWF) except they tend to fish where PRC fishes and do all your slave labour that other DWF does, so hard to believe they don't do AIS shenanigans. IIRC worse (by type) absolute was JP for tuna longliner. There's other consideration that DWF has global players interacting, i.e. JP doesn't do destructive trawling, but they run big transhipment reefers (fridge boat) to support to fish longer.
MSM will focus almost exclusively PRC. It's spiked narrative. TLDR, go track "research" on PRC DWF since ~2020 when the champaign started. The estimate of PRC DWF by west aligned research... laundered by western news went from something like 3000 to 6000 (reasonable), to 10000 to 18000... in 5 years. Meanwhile PRC wild catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons, i.e. PRC somehow built ~30000 new fishing ships in 5 years, 950% increase... only to fish 25% more. It's all stupid all the time.
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Where's the whataboutism? It is, in fact, super dooper helpful to remind people that US lawfare/propaganda has it's limits and in many domains, geopolitical reality has a PRC bias. Maybe it'll help some people understand why reeeing about US narratives against PRC keeps being futile.
Chinese fishing vessels should be sunk en masse.
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It is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
More specifically, I'd call it a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
The simplest solution is to make the fishing rights for the waters a property that can be bought and sold.
If you overfish in that system, you get no income in the future years, so greed will make you manage the fish responsibly.
This is probably very hard to do within the current international law framework.
Yeah, the only real solution is to eliminate commons.
In case of the ocean I would say that every country should have the economic right to all points in the ocean closer to them than to any other country. Everyone else gets free passage (subject to your reasonable environmental laws) and to engage in scientific operations, but only the country has any right to remove anything beyond scientific samples.
It's not perfect given that some species move about, but it would go a long ways towards controlling the problem.
That doesn't work when fish swim between properties.
Make them big enough and it works well enough.
This works reasonably well in territorial waters.
Build a wall?
And make the fish pay for it?
I seem to remember some calculations that the present value was higher if you overfished once. If interest rates are high anyway.
fish migrate
What you’re describing is different from what the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is doing. They’re essentially strip mining the ocean thousands of miles away from China, leaving the locals to deal with the ecological damage and resulting consequences.
Different and the same. What's the same is that it is a shared resource that people benefit privately from and there is no authority that can manage it globally. Like I say, those fish the Chinese caught are real, people are not sure what the long term consequences are.
Sink boats until the behavior changes. Behavior won't change until a sufficient number of boats sink. Decades of talking and explaining and diplomacy and politics have failed. The only two options remaining are accepting the status quo or sinking boats. Anything else is performative.
does a fishing boat make enough money to justify a naval escort?
would the chinese front the money for a while just to discourage the behavior?
how likely is this to lead to war?
can we sink them in a plausibly deniable way?
I dunno, drones and missiles are probably the most cost effective way. I was in favor of diplomacy 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, but I'm completely and totally done pretending diplomacy and education and hearts and minds type campaigns have any value, anymore.
I also think it's worth going to war over. The threat of killing the oceans is a pretty drastic and permanent threat to the entire world, and it can cascade into apocalyptic conditions.
Having a coherent frame of rules that allow conservation actually increases the fish yield, but China's treating it like a zero sum game. It's gotta be stopped, since they're entirely and brazenly unwilling to stop. The same drones used against the venezuelan drug boats could be targeted at the exploitative fishing boats, and a consistent year or two could force international agreements and some sort of collaborative enforcement. Drone platforms and satellite monitoring could even make it mostly autonomous.
This is so delusional and siloed from current geopolitical realities. This will lead to war and/or sanctions by China on multiple exports and imports with the offending countries.
Chinese fishing boats in the South China Sea are known for being lightly armed, boarding other ships, generally having a ‘securitt’ function.
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The need for wild-caught protein to feed fish is so strong that there is krill piracy around antarctica!
https://apnews.com/article/whales-antarctica-krill-global-wa...
I thought there were fairly large blackfly farming operations for fish feeding. maybe for non-ocean species? As with a lot of operational farming practices- it's probably a lot more complex than a few articles could easily encompass.
Did you mean black soldier fly? Farming them is a thing and there should be a lot more of them -- converting waste to protein is a major win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetia_illucens
Yes, that's the species I was recalling. There were some issues with occasional accidental releases, but other than that, they seemed like a nice process.
A friend of mine has been working on a company[1] that does exactly this: they sit on the waste stream of large agricultural processing plants and use black soldier flies to convert that waste into protein for aquaculture (and fertilizer).
1: https://www.chapulfarms.com
My notion of how to address the feed supply issue is:
All of the above are strong protein sources and duckweed and algae are fast growers and high density producers (at least an order of magnitude more than soybeans).Obviously more effort is required to farm them but with automation it should require minimal labor.
> Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish.
If something like this works, it has the double benefit of pulling carbon from the air/water and turning all of the matter into food. With typical plants we grow on land, (generally) most of the plant isn't consumed so whatever carbon it stored is a waste product. In some countries, that waste is just burned and sent back into the atmosphere. But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
> But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
I'm not sure it helps at all regarding co2, you'll shit it and breath it out in a matter of days... co2 is only a problem when you burn fossil fuels, because you reintroduce millions years of deposit back in the atmosphere in a very short period of time. That's why things like burning wood aren't a big deal other than localised pollution
There are countless carbon sinks within the ocean. It finds its way into the shells of creatures (calcium carbonate) and hangs around for a very long time in solid form. And lots of creatures die/defecate, that sinks to the bottom of the sea, and much of the carbon there doesn't rise back up since not all of it is consumed.
And when you're spreading seaweed over a fish farm, a good chunk of that is flowing back out into the ocean and contributing to the cycle of carbon deposits.
https://animatingcarbon.earth/fish-the-excretion-effect-boos...
By avoiding fishing, you stop damaging many of the carbon sink systems in the ocean, and so as a second-order effect improve the sinks we used to have.
Shitting it will not release it into the air. Maybe a small percentage, depending on it's circuit in nature. But yes, your point about the CO2 circuit stands.
Most (85-90%) of the carbon in the food we eat is breathed out, not excreted
Side note - it always amazes me (and people when I tell them) that when you lose fat from your body, they main way for that fat to leave your system, is to burn it then breathe the co2 out - that is one of the limits on how much fat you can burn a day. You do lose some of the results of the burning, and a little through sweat, but the vast majority is down to co2 leaving your system.
(Note you can temporarily also lose weight through water loss - but that isn't the loss of actual fat from your system.)
Yes it's the inverse of Feyman's comments how a tree's mass comes from what is pulled out of the air, not the ground
Turns out, we were the carbon captor all along
We need to figure out how to make 8 billion humans act as carbon sinks!
Splice tree dna, make groot a thing irl
Over time it would gradually remove CO2 since not all of it goes back, but stuff like this isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of CO2 we'd need to remove.
Planting billions and billions of trees would pull a lot more, but still would only make a small dent. Greening large desert regions with large scale water and local climate engineering projects, ocean seeding, etc. would also pull more but still only make a dent.
Tell that to the anti-cow people, they will have a cow
Unfortunately this pithy comment is inconsistent with the science. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local Most of the emissions from beef comes from negative land-use change, that is the loss of carbon-sequestering life that existed in the land for both the cows and the tons of agricultural food they eat, and methane, which is released directly to our atmosphere and is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Fortunately, if we were to phase out cattle, this methane has a half-life much shorter than CO2 and would provide important early gains in restabilizing our climate.
Cos can be grass fed. Most of the beef I have ever eaten is predominantly grass fed.
In many places cows are a natural part of the ecosystem. So much so that in rewilding parts of Scotland they have ended up releasing cattle into the wild.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
cows are a natural part of the ecosystem
Sure large herbivores were and still are part of many ecosystems.
But around where I live the majority of the grass for the grass-fed cows doesn't come from anything remotely resembling a rich ecosystem. The grass is literally 'grass': maybe one or 2 types of grass, similar amount of herbs, funghi. Hardly any insects except for flies attracted to manure. These used to be ecosystems with > 20 species of grassses and herbs per square meter.
And these are even relatively small farms; trying to upscale it beyond that to make it possible for millions of humans to eat meat multiple times a week, it won't get any better. If you're putting large amounts of cows in a much much smaller habitat then what they'd naturally use, then it's not the same ecosystem anymore.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
tldr; yes, but only if you want to feed a couple of people from it.
Do grass fed cows produce less methane than corn/grain fed cows
More, per the below lifecycle assesment study: "There was little variability between production scenarios except for the grassfed, where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 37% higher due to a longer finishing time and lower finishing weight"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24216416/
It goes on to say:
"However, reductions to GHG emissions (15-24%) were realized when soil organic carbon accrual was considered"
That link shows that twice as many emissions are attributed to farm stage vs land use change. And fta: "Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers and the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle."
So not sure there is much for me to respond to you given that.
They always start with a false equivalency anyway, comparing stuff like cane sugar with cow meat, that's just extra dumb.
I don't have proper calculation, but when you add up all the processing and extra requirement to grow high protein crops, you are actually not very far from meat cost.
Which makes sense because if meat was so inefficient, then vegetal protein replacement should be much cheaper, but they are not.
If eating food sequestered carbon, then Earth would have turned into an ice ball millions (billions?) of years ago.
he's saying the plant breathes the CO2 then turns it into food, then you feed that food to the fish instead of other fish, putting the carbon back into the life cycle
and the earth probably did turn into an ice ball millions of years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
Nope, it does not pull any carbon dioxide from air/water.
The oil with omega-3 acids is not produced from any algae, but from cultures of special strains of Schizochytrium.
Schizochytrium is a fungus-like organism (not related to true fungi). It is called "algae" in marketing language, because "Schizochytrium" or "Stramenopiles" are words unknown to the general population and because "algae" sounds more appealing to the rich vegans who have afforded to pay the high prices under which this oil has been sold for many years.
In any case, this does not matter much. Long-chain omega-3 are an essential fish food ingredient, but by mass they are a small fraction of fish food. Much more can be gained regarding carbon dioxide by using for the fish food a mixture of vegetable proteins that have been preprocessed to enable their digestion by fish.
Schyzochytrium has enabled the production of long-chain omega-3 acids without capturing small fish or krill for a few decades, but in the past the cost of Schyzochytrium oil was too high.
In order to be used as an ingredient in farmed fish food the cost of Schizochytrium oil had to be decreased a lot.
It appears that at least Veramaris has succeeded to do this, but unfortunately such progresses have not become visible yet in the retail price of Schizochytrium oil for human consumption.
A decade ago, Schizochytrium oil was 8 to 10 times more expensive than fish oil. Then its price has decreased, so that 4 or 5 years ago it already was only 3 times more expensive than fish oil.
Unfortunately, after that there were no further price reductions, so today the retail price of Schizochytrium oil is about the same as 5 years ago.
If the production cost of Schizochytrium oil has really diminished, as said in the parent article (because it cannot be used in fish food, unless it is cheaper than fish oil), then the producers have now increased profits, without decreasing the retail price. Of course, like always, it is not certain that this is really the winning strategy for them, because there may be many others like me, who wait for a reduction in the price of Schizochytrium oil in order to switch to it from fish oil, so keeping this inflated price may result in a much lower sales volume than with a smaller price.
Moreover, for whoever wants to consume vegan oil with long-chain omega-3 acids, there is an additional trap with Schizochytrium oil. The original Schizochytrium oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil (i.e. around 2 grams of omega-3 acids per 5 mL of oil), but there are many sellers who sell diluted oil at the same price like the sellers who sell non-diluted oil. Thus the true price of long-chain omega-3 acids from the sellers of diluted oil may be 10 to 20 times higher than from fish oil. Therefore when buying omega-3 capsules or bottled Schizochytrium oil one must read carefully the fine print and compute the price per gram of DHA+EPA, in order to be sure that the price is right.
To clarify for other readers... The point about "Schizochytrium is not algae" is that they do not photosynthesize and thus don't create sugars from CO2. Rather, this organism is a heterotroph and consumes various organic molecules from its environment. Industrial cultures are fed simple sugars and nitrogen sources, plus waste products like spent brewery yeast, cheese whey, and molasses.
Consumable by who? Just being not poisonous is not enough to be called consumable (taste, texture, price, availability, digestibility etc).
Ah, fish - the one farmed animal we have not figured out how to feed with soybean yet. Soon, I guess.
I'm not quite sure "fish-free fed fish” is going to have the same cache as “grass-fed beef," despite the article's suggestion.
? soy is a major ingredient in farm-fish food
Depending on the feed producer. The farmed fish feed that is considered the very best quality has about 50% fished fish in it (and hence has the natural omega3 in it). The other 50% is mostly soy and wheet, but also misc other stuff like flavor enhancers. Low quality feed is mostly land based.
This feels very close to Silicon Valley's bit about pescepescetarianism.
Is that eating fish that fish eat or eating fish that eat other fish? And why?
The second one.
I thought it was a way to make the silly character look pretentious and pseudo intellectual, but misremembered. It appears that it was actually a way for the character to narcissistically draw attention.
https://youtu.be/IC-ZBJ-Kw2E
I've been taking algae supplements lately. It tastes like fish food because it is fish food.
Apparently, it was a source of cheap protein during wars, but didn't provide enough nutrients and tastes like pond scum. It ended up in the supplement sector because it was easier to get approved as it over food. Soylent Green was inspired by it.
I hope it does go back into the fish food sector - it's cheap and nutritious but tastes worse than soy.
There is a certification group called Best Aquaculture Practices[0] that sets standards for hatcheries, farms, feed mills, and processing plants regarding sustainability and quality. They've got a new feed mill standard[1] but it seems like it gives feed mills a few years to come into compliance to use sustainable fishmeal and fish oil.
[0]https://bapcertification.org/Home [1]https://bapcertification.org/Downloadables/pdf/standards/BAP...
There are some exciting (or terrifying depending on your perspective) developments in the “lab grown/cultivated” space. I had a chance to have some WildType salmon the other day. The costs are still way above wild caught or farmed salmon, but if they can get the price down and improve the texture I could see these cultivated meats really taking off.
https://github.com/Michael-Nolan/Public/blob/main/Notes/2025...
I'm curious what they use to provide food for the lab grown salmon cells. They need all the same nutrients but even more precisely formulated since there isn't a digestive system.
It seems like it will have the same problem with inputs or perhaps even worse. This is one of the reasons I'm still skeptical about lab grown meat taking off.
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy are against farming any kind of sea food and taking away krill or seaweed from oceans. Oceans are already devastated by overfishing
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy like to say what we shouldn't do, but they're usually overidealistic, and hardly ever suggest what we should do instead. Not eating seafood is just not a realistic expectation.
We are going to end up without seafood eventually anyhow. There's no good solution, global fisheries will continue their collapse as long as we lean on them.
If there is certainty that we will end up without seafood eventually, we might as well enjoy all the seafood while we can.
I think their point is that we can either have no seafood and devastated oceans, or no seafood and healthy(ish) oceans.
Of course it is. You just don't like the expectation. What we should do is eat waaay less meat and seafood. It takes less land, water, and outside calories to product veggies and beans over meat and fish. Obviously this is not a reality for many people on the planet but it also is a reality for many people on the planet who just choose not to do it.
Except they do!
Sea Shepard DOs:
- Document illegal fishing or whaling with evidence.
- Intervene to prevent illegal capture of protected species.
- Promote awareness and education about marine conservation.
- Buy local
- Boycott trawling method of catch
This is the website of a shrimp farm in the interior of Spain. Some years working now. They do not taste like wild but they are ok. https://norayseafood.es/en/
Are those Macrobrachium? The freshwater river prawn? I can't find anything on the site, but I doubt they're doing the world's largest saltwater aquarium...
Unless the grow multiple species, it's pacific white shrimp [1] which seems to be a salt water species. Also the pictures do not look like Marcobrachium
[1] https://www.gourmets.net/salon-gourmets/2025/exhibitors-cata...
Wonder if that means they're just using stock photos of shrimp. The other guy wasn't lying when he said "interior", it's about as far from the sea in Spain as seems possible. I thought all the non-coastal fish-farming ops were doing freshwater species.
I recommend trying to eat more oysters and farmable shellfish.
They actually clean the water and have a positive impact on the ocean! Farming them is good!
This just reminds me of Louisiana oyster farmers in the US fighting against coastal restoration[1]. Part of me is convinced they are happier having more of our state erode away which will create more oyster farm beds.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/louisiana-oyster-in...
But oysters are really not good. It tastes weird with too strong a note of salty water and has a pretty bad texture that makes masticating unenjoyable. They are poor man's food that got super expensive with clever marketing and supply management (and since they need to be alive the supply chain is extremely complicated and expensive, you can't store them for long).
If you live near a sea and can get them dirt cheap why not, but if you live far into the land, they are mostly a waste of good money and a way for pretentious people to appear fancy/rich at the Christmas holiday.
There are lots of ways to cook oysters, which significantly lessens the briny taste and gelatinous texture.
While it's true that their rise in the West was mostly from clever marketing, oysters are just considered normal seafood in many countries and are cooked into dishes.
But yes, the premium price due to the raw oyster trend makes it not worth it if you live far away from the sea.
The article reads as if nobody has considered farming anchovies, sardines, anchovetta, and other feed fish. We farm land crops for land herbivores. It seems we could feed some sea herbivores and omnivores with plants, and feed some of those to sea carnivores and omnivores.
For me, the considerable environmental issues aside, the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
Take salmon for instance. In a lifetime of preparing and then eating several portions of salmon per week, I've noticed that the farmed salmon are pretty much always:
-Very pale pink color, as though the animal was unhealthy (sometimes stores even add red food dye to cover this up)
-Weak and mushy flesh, even when fresh; healthy salmon flesh is muscled and springy, it isn't naturally slimy and it holds its shape
-Weak flavor that seems to be missing a lot of the more robust flavor notes entirely
-Thinner or nearly-nonexistent layer of fat between the flesh and the scales (contributes to less flavor overall and removes a lot of the umami); the same problem also applies to the thin bands of fat between the rows of muscle in the filet itself
-Skin/scales slightly disintegrate or fleck away at a touch instead of remaining intact
I don't even bother buying it even if it's significantly cheaper.
I can't imagine that the nutrient content is the same as the wild-caught fish. And based on the sickly look and taste of the meat, it's also very hard to believe that the farmed fish live a life that they find to be pleasant, to the extent such a thing is possible.
Wild-caught salmon is pink because of the krill they eat, so in a way it’s also a dye. Farmed salmon definitely has coloring added to get this effect, but otherwise the flesh itself isn’t naturally pink.
The color in the farmed Salmon is the same compounds as the wild:
https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
The amounts differ, and the farm feed may be synthetic.
I eat plenty of farmed salmon (Atlantic salmon) because they are the default in grocery stores here and the few times I went out of my way to buy wild caught salmon I find that they are way worse. The first time I bought sockeye salmon not king salmon which was not fatty at all. The second time I bought king salmon shipped straight from Alaska and the flavor still disappointed. It's everything you say about farmed salmon: weak flesh, weak flavor, pale pink color. I'm starting to think I was scammed.
> the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
I eat wild-caught salmon every day (as part of https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet) and can totally confirm this. Farmed salmon's taste is very off-putting. I noticed this only after switching to wild salmon for a few weeks.
Arctic char and trout tend to taste more like their wild counterparts than salmon since they're raised on smaller, less industrialized farms. Many restaurants actually prefer Ora King salmon over regular king salmon due to the consistency.
A nice steamed white fish is pretty indistinguishable for me. But again I'm not a fresh fish enthusiast, and ultimately aquaculture makes adequate inputs for fish products like fish balls or fish pattys.
The easiest solution: Don't eat fish. Or our oceans may never recover.
On the contrary, farmed fish is among the most sustainable protein sources for those not willing to go full vegetarian [1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
Greenhouse gas emissions shouldn't be the only factor people consider for sustainability of their food. In the case of fish, this very article talks about the issues with farmed fish. Even a plant-based diet can be filled with unsustainable sources, such as plantations that destroy endangered habitats for palm oil, or industrial farming operations that spray lots of pesticides to harm the insect population and allow lots of fertilizer runoff into natural waterways. We're still polluting and depleting resources for many many vegetarian foods in the world.
I'd argue that if we're looking for a full top-to-bottom sustainable food system, animals will play a role. But we need to be cognizant of the whole system, not playing whack-a-mole with issues.
"...among the most..."
According to your source, there are 15 sources of protein that emit less greenhouse gases (GHGs) per 100g of protein than farmed fish, including poultry and eggs, and 16 sources that emit more (including items that are not known for their protein content like coffee, apples, and dark chocolate). Being highly charitable, farmed fish is squarely in the middle.
Additionally, farmed fish emits twice the GHGs of tofu, and almost 22 times that of nuts. So just comparing placements on the list paints a misleading picture.
As for "not willing to go full vegetarian": you may as well say "not willing to stop eating fish", because they are equally unserious limitations when discussing these topics. "Not being willing" is only a slightly more mature version of a child saying "I don't want to".
I don't think it's "unserious" to recognize that >85% of the world's population eats meat.
If you're quibbling about wording, all I meant was: farmed fish and chicken are among the most sustainable meat sources.
I'm not making a statement that people should eat meat, but many people do eat meat, so it's worth comparing which meat sources are better than others. I think it would be great if more people knew that beef produces 10x the greenhouse gases than chicken/fish do.
It's not "quibbling" to correct your mischaracterization of the truth.
If you'll forgive me borrowing your logic: "I'm not saying that people should eat beef, but many people do eat beef, so it's worth comparing which beef sources are better than others."
Plant-based diets are a very good answer to the problems caused by animal agriculture. If someone takes issue with that answer, I'd need a better reason than their personal pleasure to take them seriously in the conversation.
I agree it’s worth comparing beef sources! That was my point about within-category differences and harm reduction. Saying "tofu is cleaner" doesn’t make beef comparisons pointless - just like the existence of bicycles doesn’t make car fuel economy comparisons pointless. We should compare across categories and within them, so people who aren’t switching today still choose the lower-impact option.
Farmed seafood is among the worst garbage you can eat. Tons of antibiotics, growth hormones, fish are fed utter cheap junk so ie salmon meat has more like pork composition than a wild salmon, shrimp are even worse. If you ever saw a shrimp 'factory' and grow pond/cage and its surroundings in a typical 3rd world country where most come from, you wouldn't eat it for a long time if ever again. Literally nothing lives around those places.
Good in theory, horrible in practice.
That take’s outdated. In the US/EU, routine antibiotics in fish farming are banned [1]. Growth hormones aren’t used in edible fish. Farmed salmon’s feed changed (more plant oils), but it still delivers high omega-3s and usually less mercury than wild [2].
[1] FDA “Approved Drugs for Use in Aquaculture” — https://www.fda.gov/media/80297/download
[2] Jensen et al., Nutrients 2020 — https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12123665
OK thats a good development. But overall difference in quality of meat is even visible - farmed salmon looks like a completely different fish than wild one (if you even can get one) - akin to difference between say boar and domesticated pig (lean muscle vs tons of fatty wobbly tissue). It doesn't scream 'healthy' but that may be just emotions playing old tune.
Also what I wrote about shrimp from any 3rd world country is valid - I've seen such place this summer in Indonesia, and from what I've heard whole south east Asia is exactly like that, or worse. Getting shrimp from some western democracy with strong consumer protection rights ain't possible in many parts of Europe, not sure about other places
feeding chickens to fish doesn't sound sustainable ...
... and just a by-product of chicken production at that. Gotta eat more chickens to save the oceans.
Just eat the forage fish.
As much as I like salmon and the occasional flounder, my life would not be any worse if I had to stick to sprats (smoked sprats are delicious), sardines, anchovies and whatever else is a lower trophic level.
And you don't have to worry about mercury as a bonus.
I've always wondered why we enjoy eating fish predators, but not animal predators...
Probably because just easier to catch a predatory fish than a land predator
Throw a line in the pond, whatever bites will bite. Clean it and you've got dinner.
Versus with hunting, historically (and even now) if you miss your shot or don't hit a part that immediately takes it down, now you've got an angry wolf/bear/moose bearing down on you. Wolf is also probably too close to dog for most cultures.
Nowadays you can get meat from bear/moose/whatever, but there isn't much of a culinary tradition associated with them. So the only people out for them are the curious or macho types
I have a redneck-y enough background to have eaten some predators. The meat doesn't taste as good. A lot of it is tougher or stringier. I think pigs are omnivores though, but I don't know what they are fed on farms.
Yes that's the issue with predators, since they run around and use their muscles a lot, the meat is lean and quite hard; it doesn't make for a very tasty meal and the effort required to get this type of meal really isn't warranted.
On top of that, you can't really farm predators, almost by definition (I'm sure you could but that would be very stupid).
Pigs are omnivores, so they can be fed vegetables or even food leftovers. Grandpa raised a couple of small pigs, they ate corn mixed with vegetable scraps from the kitchen. The pigs got slaughtered and the meat was delicious.
I expect it has something to do with muscle and fat composition and the physical requirements of predating on land vs. in water. A followup question would be what about water-based mammal predators like seals and whales? And what about water-based herbivores like beavers? Can't say how it tastes personally.
Maybe because fish predators are still fish? So they still taste like fish. It seems fish-eating birds taste fishy, which is not really a desirable flavor in a bird. Maybe mammal predators are also not as tasty - then also what do you feed a farmed bear or a fox, they need to eat meat... So you'd feed them cows that we could eat ourselves? Or we raise rabbits just for them?
From a practical matter, most fish in the ocean feed on other marine life. herbivorous and omnivorous fish do exist but they are a bit more rare, and it is more common for smaller/juvenile fish. Also even among those that are primarily herbivorous, they usually go after eggs or very small fish which makes them omnivorous.
The most common fish that we eat are those that other fish also eat, like herring, and there aren't a good comparable land based animal in our current diet. It would be a bit like if a primary diet for humans would be wild rodents.
One reason could be that fish like herring schools, but wild rodents don't. It is easier to hunt large quantity of animals if they are located in the same location and bunched up.
Well speaking of eating rodents, I consider cuy (guinea pigs / cavies) quite delectable...
Because another land mammal is far more likely to accumulate diseases, parasites, and maybe toxins that are harmful to us than a fish is.
Bear is (or at least can be) delicious. You can get a lot of tasty meals out of a fat berry-fed bear.
I've never had the chance to eat cougar, but I've talked to folks who have, and they say it's their favorite meat - like a light, tender pork.
>I've never had the chance to eat cougar, but I've talked to folks who have, and they say it's their favorite meat - like a light, tender pork.
That's surprising. I would've thought it'd be dry. Or even fishy.
We're mammal predators too. Mammal herbivores travel in herd and are pretty easy to hunt. They also pose little risk. The answer is the same as to why lions don't have leopards as their main food source.
I assume it's because there aren't enough of them and they're relatively difficult to hunt/farm. Otherwise I'd be happily chowing down on lions and polar bears.
I think part of it is that the larger animal predators tend to be more muscular, so the meat isn't as delicious.
The taste difference isn't from muscle size. Predator flesh tends to be darker, coarser and gamey from high nitrogenous waste and lipid oxidation. Carnivore diets include secondary compounds like amines and fatty acid derivatives that add strong odors. Prey animals have a milder, sweeter flavor and tender texture due to lower metabolic by-products and more stable lipids. Slow twitch flesh tastes better than fast twitch flesh.
Has anyone had much luck raising crickets or other insects for feed? Fish like trout feast on them.
The article mentions black soldier fly larva which is good for fish like trout that naturally eat insects. However fish higher on the chain need to eat bait fish, and replacing those is more difficult.
Black soldier fly larva seems pretty simple to farm using organic waste too. Lots of backyard chicken keepers make simple grow boxes for them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbzedftrQJw
Why can't the bait fish eat the fly larva?
> My other advice is a one-size-fits-all food equation, which is, simply, to know where it came from. If you can't place it, trace it, or grow it/raise it/catch it yourself, don't eat it. Eat aware. Know your food. Don't wait on waiters or institutions to come up with ways to publicize it, meet your small fishmonger and chat him or her up at the farmer's market yourself.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-pescatores-dilemma_b_2463...
Makes a lot of sense.
I always find it super weird that people will eat soy bean products over, say, meat or cream when they’ve never seen a soy bean plant in their whole lives.