Ian Short

Eating fish is rather fashionable these days. I don’t fully understand why this is so, but it’s probably largely due to the well-known nutritional benefits of fish (omega-3 fatty acids and so on). What you should remember when consuming fish, though, is that you are eating a wild animal (or a farmed animal fed on wild animals), so you should proceed with the kind of caution that you might take in eating an animal that doesn’t live underwater. For instance, you might feel comfortable eating a rabbit, but I presume you wouldn’t so readily eat a pine martin, a polecat, or a dormouse. But you bought the fish in a supermarket! Does it not follow, then, that it’s a member of a species that is not endangered? No, not at all! In fact, unless you have been prudent, the chances are that the fish you buy is from a stock in trouble.

You could turn a blind eye to this, as many do. Over the years, I’ve considered how best to deal with the issue, and I see two alternatives. The first is to not eat fish. I believe this position is a highly selfless one: you refrain from eating fish to help stocks to recover, and allow others the opportunity to eat them instead. Of course, humans as a species must continue to eat fish, because we have a rapidly expanding population and a shortage of food. By choosing to not eat fish yourself, you help fish numbers to increase, with the hope that fishing will be sustainable.

There’s an alternative view to this, however, which disagrees with some of what I’ve just said. This view is that you should only buy fish caught in a sustainable manner. By doing so, you promote sustainable fisheries above unsustainable fisheries. In the long run, people have to eat fish, and the important thing is to promote good practice in the fishing industry. Roughly speaking, I think this is the view of Charles Clover, author of the influential book The end of the line. I highly recommend that you read it.

How do you buy sustainable fish though? A simple answer is that you only buy fish with the Marine Stewardship Council label on it. There has been some debate about whether all the MSC-labelled products really deserve their label, which I won’t go into. But let that debate not cloud the discussion here: you should not buy fish products without that label. And if you do buy a product with an MSC label, then you may be contributing towards sustainable fishing practices.

The Marine Stewardship Council have a fantastic service that lists all the MSC fish. That links gives the UK version of the site. You can easily find versions for other countries too. You may find that some fish you like to buy are difficult to obtain with an MSC label. What about farmed salmon, for example, which is popular in the UK? Surely it’s okay to eat, as it’s farmed? Why does even organic farmed salmon not have an MSC label?

Well the answer is a little involved; I’ll sum it up briefly. The main point is that farmed salmon are fed on wild fish, mostly, and the origin of those fish is often unclear (they may have been caught by huge trawls ploughing through the ocean floor). It is better for the environment to eat foods further down the food chain – eat the wild fish themselves (small fish, anchovies etc) rather than the salmon. So even organic salmon don’t get an MSC label, as they are fed on wild fish.

Farmed fish have other serious problems too. These domesticated fish inevitably mix with the wild fish, and if enough mixing happens, the domesticated species dominates. But the farmed fish are different to the wild species: they aren’t fit and strong wild animals that swim up rivers; they are fat and more docile. Breeding farmed fish threatens wild fish. As Charles Clover puts it Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish… Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritising wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time. We might find that society’s interests did not lie, as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has led us to believe, in a massive expansion of aquaculture.

Is organic farmed salmon actually better than non-organic farmed salmon, then? Generally, yes. The farmed fish are kept in better conditions, fed less drugs, less cramped, encouraged to move around more as they do in the wild, and this welfare helps prevent them catching lice that can spread to wild fish.

To summarise, then, non-organic farmed fish really bad, and non-organic farmed fish less bad. However, I’m not being fair here, as I’m only talking about carnivorous farmed fish. That’s generally the sort that people buy in the UK. Some farmed fish are kept in ponds and fed on vegetables. I don’t know much about this, but it sounds potentially very promising.

So often in recent times I’ve heard politicians talking about cutting back on regulations, particularly regulations from Brussels. But the fishing industry is a key example of an industry that needs regulation. To put it bluntly, if you let everyone fish as much as they like, then they will consume all fish, there will be nothing left. Species will drop to levels from which they can’t recover. They will become extinct. Don’t think the seas will be full of jelly fish instead: we’ll eat them too. In contrast, if you regulate fishing appropriately, then fish can flourish, biodiversity can return to the oceans, and humans can eat more fish too. Regulation is the only sustainable way forward.