It's amazing how efficient wild-caught seafood is in terms of giving us a nutrient-rich protein that has minimal impact on the planet. And this is truly an under-reported story. Below we share some findings on the environmental impacts of wild-caught seafood in comparison to other proteins from a study done by the Sustainable Fisheries program at University of Washington.
Almost all food production has an impact on the planet and is carbon instensive. With wild-caught seafood, however, we let nature do much of the heavy lifting; all fishermen do is gather the surplus. It shouldn't be surprising how low wild-caught seafood's carbon footprint and impact on the planet are in comparison to most other protein sources.
In my years of being a beekeeper, a key lesson I learned is that: Nature, by nature, produces excess. Cut open a tomato and see how many seeds there are. Somewhere between none and all of those seeds will become a future tomato, depending on the level of desire, care and knowledge of the gardener. In a similar way, as a beekeeper, I observed that healthy bees store vast excess quantities of honey to feed themselves through winter. Careful beekeepers take enough honey to satisfy their honey needs for a year but leave enough honey in the hive for the bees to sustain themselves through winter.
Seafood, perhaps most emblematically wild salmon, work in a similar way. With good habitat and when managed well, wild salmon runs produce excess and can feed us into perpetuity. Nature produces excess so that we can harvest salmon each and every season for as long as we like. That is, once again, if managed well by human beings. Yes, there has been overfishing. For example, there are no commercially available wild Atlantic salmon because of overfishing and because of the negative impacts that salmon farms have had on wild Atlantic salmon. But the state of Alaska does a good job of managing fisheries, as the sustainable yield principle is written into the state constitution.
In comparison, terrestrial food production has been (and continues to be) the largest driver of habitat and biodiversity loss on the planet. Terrestrial agriculture is responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emmissions--contributing more to emissions than global electricity and heat production. But how does the environmental impact of seafood compare?
Since they don't require feed (or other inputs) like farmed proteins, wild-caught fish feed and grow on their own, a big factor behind why they have the lowest emissions among animal proteins.
Eating wild-caught seafood also has two other key advantages over land-based food: minimal use of land and water.
In addition to being one of the most carbon-efficient foods on the planet, wild-caught fish require virtually no additional land, nor freshwater, and no additional feed inputs like farmed proteins do.
Agriculture is responsible for the clearing of millions of hectares of forests. Just four commodities are responsible for much of the world's rainforest deforestation--beef, soy, palm oil, and wood products. Water is more essential to life than just about anything else, yet people have less of it than ever. Some is diverted to dams for electricity, but most of the world's water supply is used for growing crops and livestock. Water pollution--much of which comes from agricultural runoff like pesticides and fertilizer, also plays a large role in reducing our access to clean potable water. In the case of wild-caught seafood, we are using very little additional freshwater (i.e., cleaning equipment). We are using what nature gave us.
With all this being said, we believe you should feel great about eating our Alaska Gold wild-caught seafood, knowing that is both nutrient-dense but also that it has less impact on the planet than other forms of protein.
Kendall
Fish Monger at Alaska Gold Seafood
