fish stick-it-to-me

Although I've been claiming to be a vegetarian for a few months now, I've gotta fess up. I'm actually what's known as a pescatarian, or as my Ohio relatives insist, a "fishatarian." I was going easy on myself because the pretext for my vegetarianism, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, focused only on the nutritional and ethical dangers of corn-fed beef and chicken....


....and more honestly, I really, really like fish. So I continued to obliviously- and happily- eat salmon or tuna once a week or so until I read a piece in today's NY Times dining section, when Mark Bittman, author of Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking cruelly burst my bubble.

A self-proclaimed fish-lover, Mark gloomily recounts the rise of large-fleet fishing, which has depleted the oceans of many types of commonly consumed fish, and the prevalance of dubious fishing tactics. Because buying fresh fish has become such an "ethical and logistical nightmare," not to mention, less-than-cheap. Mark offers his thoughts on what was once thought of as an alternative panacea, farm-raised fish:



"...With the exception of mollusks, which have been farmed forever with little environmental impact and sometimes with as much flavor as wild, most of the products of aquaculture are not only not worth cooking but are also environmentally challenged. In fact, farm-raised fin fish are really the cage-raised chickens of the sea: in many instances wild fish are harvested to produce feed for farmed fish (nearly 90 percent of the world’s fish oil goes into fish food), and it takes three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon (other farmed species require even more). Aquaculture is also a local pollutant and a major consumer of antibiotics, and it has long been thought that escaped farmed fish will interbreed with and weaken wild fish."



I'm sad....for the fish, and for me! Who knew that fishing could be so cruel to the fish, to the environment, and to the consumer. What do you think? Is it posssible to eat sustainably raised fish on a meager grad school budget?




Meanwhile, thanks to Bittman's article and the judgmental eyes of this guy:
I am going to go fish-free!