With Regard to Effect

While perusing a restaurant menu during a recent visit with relatives, I commented that a book I had read had somewhat ruined seafood menu items for me.  The book, Bottomfeeder — How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, takes a look at some of the fish and shellfish that we do eat, and discusses environmental, health, and other issues and impacts that surround each one.

My brother-in -law asked which seafood item would be ‘the worst offender’ and why.  There were actually several that came to mind, but the most memorable — for me as an avid fan of sushi — is bluefin tuna.  There are several issues associated with this food:  high bioaccumulation potential — the higher an animal is in the trophic levels, the greater its potential for accumulating toxic substances; overfished and understocked; the capture of wild stock to fatten and sell as ‘farmed’ tuna; the impacts associated with some aquaculture practices  in general, etc.  My brother-in-law then asked if this was in fact less an ethics issue and more of an environment and health issue, and  that surely cost-benefit analyses can be used to determine whether it made sense to eat something.  I am oversimplifying here, but he speculated that certain criteria, such as ‘taste’, can be weighted more and could in the end ultimately mean that the benefits of eating something outweighed the costs to the environment, to health, etc.

Honestly, I had not thought to separate ethics from the environment, or health from the others.  It would be an interesting exercise, but I do not know how to begin doing it.  To me, they are very much intertwined.  Is it ethical to oversee the demise of species just because they taste good?  Especially if there are alternatives, both in the fish to eat and the livelihood it feeds.  A general rule seems to be that about two pounds of fish meal is required for every pound of farmed fish we produce.  That is resource-intensive.  Is that ethical?  And even if there were no ethics implications, it does not seem cost-effective or beneficial.  One of the book’s arguments is that we should consider eating from lower in the seafood ‘chain.’  The fish meal used to feed farmed fish, for example, tends to be made from the lower-on-the-food-chain sardine-type fishes that are neither endangered nor bad-tasting.   These fishes tend not to have a high load of accumulated toxic substances compared to the top-of-the-food-chain fish, and so an added benefit is that we are less likely to ingest the bad stuff.

I think, though, that I completely misrepresented the intentions of the book and also missed an opportunity for more interesting discourse by taking the bait and reducing my answer down to ‘bluefin tuna.’  I am reading another book now called The World Without Us, which is something of a thought exercise on what will be left in our wake should humans suddenly disappear from the planet.  A compelling section deals with nurdles, the small plastic pellets that have been found to be a major pollutant in the marine environment. (aside:  I would highly recommend watching this short video). It has also been found that some zooplankton, which fish and birds feed on, have started incorporating these plastic parts and that certain birds even selectively ingest certain plastic colors.  Plastic is ubiquitous now.  And sometimes insidious, ‘hidden’ in many products available to us now.  Almost all of my daughter’s innocuous-looking stuffed animals incorporate these plastic pellets, for example.

But the conversation I wished I had had was not about not using plastic or not eating fish.  I minimize the ‘message’ by distilling whatever it may have been to generalized statements — like ‘don’t eat bluefin tuna’ or ‘don’t use plastic’.   To me, the value is in being able to help me think about the resource and start asking questions so I can make more informed decisions, be it at the restaurant table or the toy store or anywhere else. I would like to get to a point — from an ethical, environmental, health and whatever else perspective –  where having ‘regard to effect’ always factors in.

“And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.” (excerpt from President Barack Hussein Obama’s inaugural address)