This seems like a good move by Whole Foods:
Standing on the deck of his rusted steel trawler, Naz Sanfilippo fumed about the latest bad news for New England fishermen: a decision by Whole Foods to stop selling any seafood it does not consider sustainable.
Starting Sunday, gray sole and skate, common catches in the region, will no longer appear in the grocery chain’s artfully arranged fish cases. Atlantic cod, a New England staple, will be sold only if it is not caught by trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, a much-used method here.
“It’s totally maddening,” Mr. Sanfilippo said. “They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy.”
Whole Foods says that, in fact, it is doing its part to address the very real problem of overfishing and help badly depleted fish stocks recover. It is using ratings set by the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. They are based on factors including how abundant a species is, how quickly it reproduces and whether the catch method damages its habitat.
***Still, Whole Foods is only one buyer, and there will be “plenty of other market demand,” said Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a trade group here.
“It’s the precedent and the message it sends out that’s really unfortunate,” said Mr. Giacalone, whose family runs a fish auction that sells to Whole Foods. “Whole Foods is a reputable, credible food source for a big community of people, and so when their headquarters makes this kind of statement, it’s not good for the industry.”
You know what else isn’t good for the industry? No fish.
BTW- if you are so inclined, there are apps from Monterey Bay Aquarium that you can use to help you determine what fish to buy when you are at the store.
Cacti
Good for Whole Foods.
Now if they’d just rethink their anti-union and anti-healthcare positions.
PurpleGirl
Gee, it sounds like this is the market making a decision based on information about the current market conditions and possible future market conditions. Isn’t this what the businessmen say they want?
PeakVT
“They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy.”
That’s right, because the Northern cod fishery collapse could never happen anywhere else.
I realize that people working in extractive industries have incentives to stick their heads in the sand, but it’s still maddening.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
It’s also worth noting that not so long ago a Boston Globe investigation found that often people in Massachusetts were purchasing fish that had been deliberately mislabeled by the stores.
http://www.boston.com/business/specials/fish_testing/
Shocking, innit?
General Stuck
I only eat Sockeye Salmon and Ocean Perch, and nothing farm raised. I did eat shrimp now and then, but don’t trust where it came. Shrimp can absorb a lot of toxic contamination. And from the deformed fish in the Gulf, a human predator might eat that poison and grow and extra foot, or a nuther asshole – shudder
Punchy
Help me with this…..wont the sales of cod now triple, to make up for the absence of sole and skate, leading to the demise of cod down the road? Isnt the true problem of overfishing simply overpopulation?
Mr Stagger Lee
This season’s The Deadliest Catch, the blue crab count was halved. So they are competing for half the pay. So some are going for the red crab. I guess if there is crab season is cancelled next year, I guess they could go the Russian or Canadian grounds, that probably be fun, The Wizard gets nabbed by the Canadians, the Kodiak by the Russians(and Wild Bill gets to do salt mining) Northwestern gets away with it,and the Time Bandit wins(but don’t tell how they do it)
General Stuck
It was only a matter of time, with this guy in the White House.
Election time special prosecutor?
RSA
It’s not just fish, of course. We see the same tension (and tragedies) in list of endangered species, which runs to hundreds of entries, deforestation in the Amazon, global climate change–wherever people’s livelihoods depend on some limited resource.
Davis X. Machina
@Punchy: If they catch it one cod at a time — and that’s the non-trawl option, doing it Captains Courageous-style — they’ll never catch enough to get to that poit, not remotely.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Punchy:
a) Theoretically – but whether the cod population is actually large enough for that is pretty questionable
b) Yes, absolutely – but that doesn’t stop fishermen in the US (or Europe for that matter) from trying to pretend that reality is A-OK and it’s just the wicked Green lobby who are starving their children and taking away their manhoods. Basically, we’ve eaten an enormous amount of nature’s larder – and are now trying to pretend that there’s another whole larder just waiting for our attention. It’s heart-breaking when you read of how the sea used to boil with fish in areas where there’s nothing left worth catching.
Suffern ACE
@PeakVT: The cod are still there, I tell you. The government just won’t let you know where they are.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Suffern ACE:
I did wonder why the government was equipping those sea bass with lasers….
MikeJ
@General Stuck:
Nothing wrong with farm raised catfish if you get it from the US. The farms in the US are actually inspected and run pretty well. Farmed fish are more sustainable than wild caught, but you want them to be well farmed. I pass on Atlantic salmon usually because it’s almost
all farmed and tastes like mush and we’ve got the best fish in the world here in the Pacific NW.
I’ve seen footage of some of the Asian farms. Blech.
Baud
@General Stuck: The Secret Service agents were just following orders.
Spaghetti Lee
You know what else isn’t good for the industry? No fish.
This, I guess. I do feel bad for the fisherman they quoted, but if things keep going the way they’re going, his kids and grandkids are going to be poorer, hungrier, and angrier.
General Stuck
@MikeJ:
Don’t trust the feed, such as ground fish parts with high levels of mercury in them. That get concentrated in farm raised fish fed that stuff. But I am not all that well versed on the industry, other than being generally hysterical about anything other than whole natural foods, whatever the kind.
General Stuck
@Baud:
It would be irresponsible for a wingnut not to speculate.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Spaghetti Lee:
I am not immensely sympathetic, because they’ve had decades of warnings from scientists, as well as the evidence of their own experience – and they still haven’t managed to come up with anything more constructive than blaming other people for realities that they themselves have done a good deal to create. I do feel a certain contempt for the various politicians who’ve put off the evil day and soothed the fishing lobby with all sorts of fake quota schemes – but, at the end of the day, the fishermen didn’t want to look at what they were actually seeing and come up with a real plan.
kdaug
@General Stuck:
In my experience, humans have plenty of assholes already.
Litlebritdifrnt
DH turned on my favorite Star Trek movie “The Voyage Home” this morning. When you boil down to its central message we allow a species to go extinct at our peril. I just loved Spock’s line “it would be arrogant to assume that the message was meant for humans.” Of course the delightful Hump Back Whale song was a bonus.
There is a fishing show on my local radio station every monday morning and the callers are always complaining about bag and size limits. The fishing expert always reminds them that at some point you have got to let the stocks recover, therefore you can’t have fish taken during spawning season. He has said more than once what John said up top. “You know what is really bad for fishing? No fish.”
Walker
Also know as their customers. Look, either you are pro freemarket, or you want to be regulated. Pick a side.
Spaghetti Lee
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
Well, that makes me sad as well. I’m not accusing you of this, but it seems some people here have to gloat about how people get what they deserve, and I just can’t do that.
Roger Moore
@PeakVT:
The problem is that they treat fishing as an extractive industry rather than a sustainable one. Industries like fishing and forestry can be run for the long haul, carefully harvesting only at the level the resource can produce. It’s just that people have to reorient their thinking, accept that the resource they’re harvesting isn’t inexhaustible, and decide that preserving the long-term viability of the industry is more important than short-term profits.
MosesZD
Let’s see, a few years ago a huge study was done on the impacts of over-fishing and pollution on the industry. There were, in 2006, 29 staple species that had collapsed.
That doesn’t include species that collapsed a long time ago and never made it to the report, like the Sardine fisheries along the Pacific Northwest. Hasn’t been a sardine taken from some of those areas for 50 years.
And, yeah, the whine… But when the Canadian Grand Banks collapsed in 1992, 10,000 fishermen lost their jobs and another 40,000 up-and-down the distribution chain.
The cod still haven’t recovered, though, finally, there seems to be some hope as they’re finally starting to see enough mature fish in the area that they’ll be able to make a comeback.
pseudonymous in nc
@Punchy:
The price will see to that. This is one issue where right-wing papers in the UK aren’t engaged in self-denial, because they actually accept that overfishing means no more fucking cod. Instead, they suggest pollack and coley and sea bream.
I can even understand the perspective of the fishing fleets, because they don’t believe that moratoriums will be enforced, leaving Them Over There to catch the last remaining stocks. They’re also going to be catching depleted fish anyway and chucking them dead back into the sea before they reach land. But they’ve also adopted the attitude that fishery collapses happen to other people.
lamh35
OT, forget walking, driving, talking, whatever while Black, now you can even close on a home and visit your newly bough property while Black and NOT get arrested.
Couple held at gunpoint, arrested after buying home
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Spaghetti Lee:
I am not gloating, just very tired of this game. I grew up in what was once a major fishing town in Europe – and which is now a food-processing center, with all the fish brought in by boats registered in other countries. I saw how the local politicians and fishermen did everything they could to avoid the facts – quotas, compensation in exchange for not fishing, every boondoggle you could imagine. After a while, you get sick of people refusing to deal with the facts. We all did it – fishermen, politicians, businessmen, consumers who just wanted a nice bit of cod the way they’d always had it and who couldn’t believe how expensive it was. I guess you just get tired of the games and the way we humans will do anything to keep thinking about the comfortable short-term rather than try and prepare for the future.
JoyfulA
@Cacti: And if their liberarian founder could stop writing Wall Street Journal editorial page screeds, which is why I want nothing to do with Whole Foods.
Roger Moore
@MikeJ:
That depends on the fish. Plant eating fish like tilapia can be raised very sustainably. Predatory fish like salmon are often fed on wild-caught fish, so you aren’t really helping matters. Meanwhile, they’re put in the fish equivalent of feed lots, with all the problems of pollution and disease you have with feed lots on land. And they’re also starting to genetically engineer the salmon, so there’s some worry about polluting the gene pool if they escape. It’s worth noting that the Monterrey Bay Aquarium rates wild caught West Coast salmon better on their scale for sustainability than any farm-raised.
AA+ Bonds
Exploitation of the atomized proletariat isn’t sustainable either, and unlike fish, workers know how to use guns
I hate to be that guy but it is really bourgie to worry about luxury food production while people are suffering to earn money to buy food, especially in the non-holistic market-fantasy pseudo-model used by libertarians like Whole Foods Asshole
The only way I can see to make seafood from fauna of this size ‘sustainable’ is to zero population growth and then start bringing it down across the globe
You want a policy solution? work to cut out the expensive layer between algae and people in consumption
MikeJ
@Roger Moore: I did include a caveat in my comment, and noted that farm raised salmon basically have no flavour at all compared to a nice Copper River King. Which we should be getting around here in about another month. Mmmmmmm.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@AA+ Bonds:
People – including the workers – will suffer a damn sight more once they’ve eaten all the animals/fish. This isn’t about class-struggle or bourgeois sentimentality – it’s about sustainability, rates of consumption, basic brute facts.
Corner Stone
@Roger Moore:
Bwah haha ha hahaha!
Linnaeus
Overfishing is a serious problem. That said, if addressing the problem (still the right thing to do) puts people out of work, then those people need to be helped.
Quarks
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that Whole Foods, which makes its living catering to “green people,” has decided to do something to please those customers.
Meanwhile, yes, the overlooming issue here is overpopulation, not fishery methods. The best long term way to help fish populations is to help Planned Parenthood.
AA+ Bonds
@Corner Stone:
I’d just say “these industries are sustainable because poor people can be killed off with ease”
Schlemizel
When I lived in Florida I was near the so-called Indian River. Its one of the last places in the US to get shellfish. The place was crawling with guys from New England that had over harvested for years & destroyed their native populations. Nobody was doing well because there were so many people competing for dwindling numbers. They had also run the shrimpers out of business because of over harvesting. None of these guys seemed smart enough to understand they were the problem.
BTW – the city of Titusville had been fighting EPA for decades over a sewage treatment plant. The city dumped its semi-treated sewage into the Indian River at the North end of the beds. The state had to shut down harvesting for periods of time because of the e-coli counts (which was blamed on Dolphins!). You may want to consider that next time you are at the raw bar.
Corner Stone
@JoyfulA:
Any normal human who has been in a Whole Foods, or a parking lot of a Whole Foods, knows first hand what completely selfish, self-absorbed fucking assholes people who shop at WF are.
I swear I’ve never seen such Thunderdome Parking Mentality as I have in a Whole Foods off Kirby in Houston.
Schlemizel
@Quarks:
Better than PP
http://www.vhemt.org/
AA+ Bonds
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
I don’t want to play down the issue of the size of the pie but as you can tell, I don’t actually think this Whole Foods business is about that at all, but instead about luxury foods that are unsustainable anyway through any means but starvation of millions
And again, I think this is a demand-side issue, one that can be addressed in a lot of ‘stealth’ ways involving support for women’s rights across the world
I mean, buying salmon at Whole Foods? That is all about class struggle, no foolin’ . . .
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Quarks:
Fishery methods do matter, actually. The mesh size in the nets affects how much of the population of fish you catch – are you taking the young fish before they breed and radically cutting into the replacements for the population of a given species? What sort of nets and fishing techniques are you using? Are you tearing up the ocean bed – which also ain’t great news for fish populations, crustaceans etc etc.
Corner Stone
@Quarks: Actually, fishery methods are indeed the problem.
The underlying problem may be short term greed and profit, but it’s the fisheries that are the issue.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Roger Moore:
The problem is that they treat fishing as an extractive industry rather than a sustainable one. Industries like fishing and forestry can be run for the long haul, carefully harvesting only at the level the resource can produce. It’s just that people have to reorient their thinking, accept that the resource they’re harvesting isn’t inexhaustible, and decide that preserving the long-term viability of the industry is more important than short-term profits.
And it CAN be done for fisheries. For example, NZ has the sixth largest EEZ fishing zone in the world, and has implemented scientific monitoring and quota management for species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quota_Management_System
Of course, NZ, like Canada, considers administration to be a matter of good governance rather than the US model of a competition between monied political interests.
AA+ Bonds
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
@Corner Stone:
I think the point Quarks was making is that fishery methods matter but only in context of distribution and growth
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@AA+ Bonds:
Fish wasn’t, isn’t and doesn’t have to be a luxury food. Cod and skate were once extremely common staple fish. Whole Foods isn’t the key issue here – and it shouldn’t distract you. We might just be able to avoid starving millions if we take sustainability seriously.
Roger Moore
@MikeJ:
And my point is that it isn’t just about flavor. Some fish just can’t be, or at least aren’t being, farmed well. In that case, a well managed fishery is likely to be more sustainable as well as producing better quality than bad attempts at farming.
@Corner Stone:
It can be done. Most of the pulp wood and a fair amount of the construction timber in the US is produced sustainably on timber plantations- or at least a hell of a lot more sustainably than the kind of clear cutting you see with surviving old-growth forest. Similarly, some of the fisheries managed to catch themselves before they collapsed and switch to reasonably sustainable harvesting. I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but we know it’s possible because it’s actually being done.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@AA+ Bonds:
Yes, but distribution and growth are pretty much the keys to this particular problem.
freelancer
Everything in moderation, MmmKay?
Woman dies from Heart Attack at 30, drank more than 2 gallons of Coca-cola a day.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@AA+ Bonds:
You know, people buy salmon at that well-known elite emporium Market Basket too. Just sayin’.
Quarks
@Corner Stone: I’m aware of the problems with fishery methods, including trawlers, blasting of coral reefs, pummeling of ocean floor areas and so on. I’m also very much aware of the issues of bycatch and how the loss of sea turtles and other species have altered ocean ecosystems, and the way increased technology (the ability to catch bluefin tuna, for instance) has negatively impacted several species. And yes, I know that some fisheries are more sustainable than others.
However, I stick by my original statement: the major long term issue facing all fisheries is human overpopulation.
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
Trader Joe’s is always a problem because of their business practices, not their customer base. A key part of TJ’s success is that they’ve gone after store locations where other supermarkets were unwilling to go, both because they were smaller than a traditional supermarket and because they had grossly inadequate parking. That lets them squeeze into places conventional supermarkets can’t, and they can often save a bundle on rent because their locations are considered unattractive by other businesses.
It’s especially bad at their older locations. Just try shopping at the Arroyo Parkway TJ’s in Pasadena; that’s the original Trader Joe’s for those who are counting. Their parking lot has only about 15 spaces for the whole store, and in a neighborhood where you can assume that cars are the dominant way people get there. The parking situation probably isn’t as bad as it is in Boston, but only because the people parking there are Southern Californians rather than Bostonians.
AA+ Bonds
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
Well this once again is a consumption issue as well, and certainly there’s been some good address of differences across species above
AA+ Bonds
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
I don’t see how that changes things to be honest
Todd Dugdale
It was a little over two years ago that Wingnuttia was all abuzz about Obama banning sport fishing.
“In what may be the worst example of outdoor sports reporting in the history of America, ESPN has claimed that President Barack Obama is on the verge of banning recreational fishing.”
Not just ESPN, but also Fox News, who cautiously and thoughtfully presented the issue as “Obama’s Latest Assault on Freedom – New Regulations Will Ban Sport Fishing”.
Even NPR’s Juan Williams ran a TotN show where he invited callers to “admit” to fishing in defiance of the ‘ban’. In this profoundly stupid show, he prompted callers to “confess” to having fished at some point in their lives – anonymously, so as to “avoid prosecution”.
Egg Berry
@Roger Moore:
That’s worked so well in other ‘free market’ industries, like banking, for instance.
ruemara
@lamh35: Give it a bit and the blog’s Zimmerman apologists who are telling us not to get all hyped up, will have an official response on how the couple was probably threatening.
Commish
“Cod” by Mark Kurlansky is a great little book that is relevant to this discussion.
Robert Sneddon
When the last tuna is caught and served up on tasty tasty nigiri rice we can always return to catching that old staple of the sea which thanks to vigorous scientific research and limited harvesting has made a great comeback and is no longer in danger of extinction.
Whales.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
This is socia1ist heresy, my friend. Pure Hitler/Stalin/Obama socia1ism.
Short term profit is the absolute God of the Harvard MBA.
YoohooCthulhu
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
We don’t really have many small farmers anymore, so the mindset is a lot less familiar to us. Traditionally, people who work in fishing and farming–where there’s so much that depends on environmental conditions and is out of one’s control anyway–develop a very fatalistic victim mindset, where everything is the result of “unfair” impositions on their profession. “If only there was more rain/more sun/better tides/warmer weather/colder weather–we could do well this year!” (If one were to believe these things were their fault…they’d quickly leave the profession or drink themselves into oblivion)
They tend to feel like they’re constantly under assault by the capricious forces of nature. This makes them fairly thin-skinned in some funny ways, so they’re hyper offended by any additional government or societal imposition on their lifelihood, which just adds onto the background of uncertainty provided by the elements.
The Pale Scot
The insanity of doing the same the over and over. In the 80’s after years of complaints from local fisherman about Russian trawlers off the East Coast the US moved the fishing limit from 12mi. to 200mi. Immediately banks offered loans to the fishermen that enabled them to buy modern fishing boats just like the ruskies, 10 yrs later the catch was less than before the limit change. We have caught and eaten 97% of the the the ocean’s large predator fish. Allowing a new balance to emerge
Welcome to New Cambrian,
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Jellyfish-The-Next-Kings-of-the-Sea.html
Corner Stone
@Quarks: Who are you to tell me how many babies I can have?!
StringonaStick
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: Uh, I wish this attention to monitoring of fish stocks was still true in Canada; Stephen Harper and his band of merry neocons are about to totally gut the jobs of people who do the counting. I know this because I am friends with 2 Canadians in these jobs, and they know what’s coming.
Harper also just announced that he is cutting the national oil spill/pipeline break rapid response teams by 50%. While there are now these teams scattered across the very, very large country of Canada, after the cuts there will only be a team in (1) Montreal, and (2) Ontario. I read a copy of the Globe and Mail a week ago while coming back to the US; one page was about all the pipelines being built everywhere with Harper’s ready approval, and the facing page was an article about these cuts.
Three more years of Harper and Canada is going to be well and truly trashed by these bastards.
nellcote
Then there was the time Cheney diverted water to gooper potato farmers in Idaho, killing off nearly 80,000 salmon in the Klamath river…
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/
Left Coast Tom
@nellcote: Those particular goopers would actually be in south-central Oregon, where the Klamath River starts.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has had their ‘red/yellow/green’ thing for seafood sustainability for quite some time, nice to see it get attention.
Merryl
I’m a graduate student in the Ocean Sciences, and this is one of the things I try to avoid thinking about too much, because it keeps me up nights (the other one is ocean acidification).
The Monterey Bay Aquarium had a documentary on the fishing industry and the consequences of overfishing and climate change the last time I visited…think it was called Empty Oceans, Empty Nets. Don’t know if it’s available to watch online, but I’d highly recommend it. Scared the crap out of me, though.