12 Fish Every Eater Should Avoid

This is the fourth installment of "On the Hook," a five-part series focused on how consumers can help further the sustainable seafood movement. For more posts in this series, see here, here and here.

Guides to sustainable seafood selection are becoming as plentiful as fish in the sea. The Blue Ocean Institute, SeaChoice, SustainableSushi.net, FishWise, Environmental Defense Fund, and Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program all provide handy tools to navigate restaurant menus and supermarket's seafood coolers. Another guide recently joined the wave of health- and earth-friendly fish guides — and it addresses even more of the murky details that make sustainable seafood such a complex topic.

Food and Water Watch just unveiled its 2010 Smart Seafood Guide, a manual offering sustainability-minded shoppers advice on more than 100 fish and shellfish. While most fish guides provide details on the health impacts of eating fish with high mercury counts or the environmental repercussions of purchasing overfished species, the Smart Seafood Guide adds a new element to the mix. Food and Water Watch's guide also rates seafood on its socioeconomic impact. The Smart Seafood Guide informs consumers on how various types of fish and shellfish impact coastal and fishing communities. In other words, the guide isn't just about health and the environment — it's also about locavorism.

To that end, the Smart Seafood Guide provides a national guide as well as regional manuals to different fish and shellfish choices. Food and Water Watch analyzed these fish based on where they come from, if they're caught or farmed locally, how they're caught, how they're farmed, and if they're associated with any contaminants. The group used the answers to these questions to create its "Dirty Dozen," a list of fish and shellfish so unsustainable from a health, environmental, and socioeconomic perspective that they failed to meet at least two of Food and Water Watch's criteria. Find out after the break which fish didn't do so swimmingly on their evaluations.

According to Food and Water Watch, the 12 fish all consumers should avoid (in no particular order) are as follows:

-King Crab

-Caviar

-Atlantic bluefin tuna

-Orange roughy

-Atlantic flatfish (sole, halibut, and flounder)

-American eel

-Atlantic cod

-Imported catfish

-Chilean sea bass

-Atlantic and farmed salmon

-Imported shrimp

There are, of course, other fish consumers should stay away from or eat in limited quantities because of health or environmental concerns. But if you're looking for a hard and fast rule about the worst of the worst choices, it doesn't get much simpler than a Dirty Dozen list.

Another great aspect about Food and Water Watch's guide is that it classifies fish based on their taste qualities, dividing species up into categories like "Mild Fish," "Thick and Flavorful Fish," and "Steak-like Fish." Seafood aficionados can check out which fish are sustainable in each of these categories, making it easy to swap out an unsustainable choice in a recipe for a similar-tasting swimmer that's more health- and earth-friendly.

It's easy for diners to feel like they're drowning in a sea of information about which fish to eat. Fish guides may not answer all of the questions consumers have, but they're certainly a useful tool in making the topic a little less murky. To access Food and Water Watch's 2010 Smart Seafood Guide, click here.

Photo credit: FreeCat via Flickr