We’ve all heard about organic and green products, but at the Sustainable Foods Institute conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Thursday, executive director Julie Packard announced that 37% of all retailers were had removed seafood items from their shelves that were not sustainable. This is up from just 20% a few years ago.
The Aquarium, a leader in seafood sustainability through its Seafood Watch Program, also surveyed 22,000 consumers and found fully one-third were aware of sustainable seafood inititives. And among those people, most “strongly agreed” with the statement “I worry about the future availability of healthy seafood.”
And what are unsustainable fish? Those that are being caught at a such a rapid pace that the populations eventually head toward collapse. Bluefin tuna are one example, since breeding-age fish will likely be fished out of the Atlantic by 2012, according to a recent analysis by WWF. Yet, the fish are still considered a delicacy in some restaurants.
As the survey shows, consumers are responding. They might get another dose of reality in “The End of the Line,” a new documentary by British environmental writer Charles Clover, a clip of which was shown at the conference. The “first major documentary about overfishing,” the frankly shocking images of industrial fish harvesting might further cause consumers to make the connection between the fish on the plate and dwindling stocks in the sea.
The message at the conference was not “avoid fish,” rather to encourage businesses to promote more sustainable practices — an approach that is underway.