*Sustainable fishing

Today in class we had a special guest: Yu Huang, a Ph.D. student here at UW who spent a good chunk of time researching aquaculture and shrimp farming in southeast China. The entire enterprise raised the ever-important question of sustainability of our food. As Yu Huang described, the more intensive the farming, the more inputs (such as antibiotics) were necessary. As farmers tried for higher yields, they shifted their farms from a polyculture to a monoculture, similar to crop farmers in the US. Not surprisingly, the same thing happens here when farmers try to cut down on biodiversity: they must bring in outside inputs to bring the land back to where it should be and would have been if they were not trying to force a monoculture. Even animal farmers experience the same phenomenon, and are forced to pump the animals full of antibiotics and other drugs.

Something that has been very central to me through this course is the importance of sustainability and the debate between local and organic foods. Which is more sustainable? Or can sustainability be placed in its own category? Obviously the best choice is food that is grown locally, organically, and sustainably, but when that is not possible where should the stress be placed? Should we buy local conventionally grown food or organic food that has been trucked across the country? And when it comes to fishing, is it more sustainable to eat wild seafood that needed barrels and barrels of oil to procure in the open ocean and even more to ship to us, or locally farmed seafood that has required all sorts of inputs and possibly polluted the environment and local species? And which is healthier!? There are so many questions.

As far as the question of sustainable seafood goes however, there is a great resource that catalogues the most sustainable fish etc for each region of the country. The magnificent Monterey Bay Aquarium keeps a list posted on their website: http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp