5 Ways to Seek Out Sustainable Seafood

This is the second 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.

Navigating the seafood selection at stores and restaurants can be almost as murky as the briny deep itself. With a bevy of fish guides, certification programs, and health and environmental warnings out there, it's no wonder many consumers feel stumped about what types of seafood they should be putting on their plates. Change.org is here to break it down into five simple steps. Once all consumers and purveyors start sourcing seafood sustainably, we can finally ensure that there will indeed be plenty of fish in the sea.

Check the Fish Guides

A slew of organizations offer up guides and wallet-sized cards to help consumers choose seafood selections that are both environmentally friendly and low in mercury, a heavy metal that can cause numbness, fatigue, and blurred vision in adults and brain development problems and learning disabilities in children. For the best out there, try downloading guides from Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program, the Blue Ocean Institute, SeaChoice, SustainableSushi.net, Fishwise, and Environmental Defense Fund. These organizations look at how fish are caught, where their population numbers stand, and how much mercury they contain.

Know Where to Buy

Some supermarkets score better than others when it comes to sourcing and selling seafood. Greenpeace ranks national grocery stores on their availability of sustainable seafood through its annual "Carting Away the Oceans" report. The 2010 scorecard examined 20 national supermarkets' sustainable seafood policies, scoring the stores as "good," "pass," or "fail." Only half of those surveyed earned passing marks, with Target, Wegman's, and Whole Foods coming in as the best choices. See how your local grocery chain fares by checking Greenpeace's 2010 report.

Eat Locally

Eating fish native to your region of the country is always a more sustainable choice than dining on seafood shipped from hundreds or thousands of miles away (unless of course, those regional fish have low population numbers!). Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program provides regional seafood guides, so you can see what's safe and sustainable in your neck of the woods.

Know the Rules

Casson Trenor, Senior Markets Campaigner for Greenpeace, says that more than relying on fish guides, it's important to understand a few general concepts. For one, when selecting fish, the smaller the better. A sardine, for example, is a significantly greener choice than a larger fish like swordfish. Because sardines are at the bottom of the food chain and don't have a very long lifespan, they don't play quite as crucial of a role in the ecosystem and they don't take in much mercury. Secondly, try to stay away from carnivorous fish. These take in more mercury and tend to be higher up on the food chain. And third, shellfish—especially filter-feeders like oysters, clams, and mussels—tend to be a greener choice than fish fillets. Many clams, oysters, and mussels come from farms, and shellfish farms (with the exception of shrimp) are some of the best out there in terms of creating a minimal environmental impact.

Push for Change

To really create a sustainable seafood system, we eventually need to take the onus of finding eco-friendly options off of consumers and put it on seafood purveyors and distributors. Consumers can push for these large corporations to start sourcing and selling fish in a more environmentally responsible manner. Through its Oh-No-Costco campaign, Greenpeace is asking for the discount club to put three measures in place: One, implement an effective and publicly available sustainable seafood policy. Two, provide transparent labeling so consumers can know what they're buying and where it came from. And finally, Greenpeace wants the store to stop selling all Red List fish, beginning immediately with Chilean sea bass and orange roughy.

Sign onto Greenpeace's petition, and help move endangered fish from supermarket coolers to where they belong — the ocean.

Photo credit: naotakem via Flickr