Want to Eat Green? Buy Frozen

When you're standing at the fish counter in the grocery store, it seems like the major choice you face is what type of fresh fish to buy. Do you go with farmed or free-range? Conventional or organic? Which of these is better for the planet?

It turns out that you may be asking the wrong questions. The better choice, believe it or not, is frozen fish. A New York Times op-ed by Astrid Scholz, a food systems researcher, and Ulf Sonesson and Peter Tyedmers, two ecological economists, makes the claim that any consumer buying fish a long distance from where it was caught will be making a much more ecological choice by shopping from the freezer section.

The authors did a study on the life cycle of salmon, which found that most other criteria for ecological soundness were overwhelmed by the difference in impact between transporting fresh fish versus frozen fish.

"When it comes to salmon, the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon," the authors write in the op-ed.

If Japanese customers, who fly in most of their fish despite living on an island, were to buy 75 percent of their salmon frozen, it would be of more benefit to the earth than if the entirety of Europe and North America restricted themselves to buying only locally caught salmon.

Makes you think again about the freezer section, doesn't it? Luckily, fish that's flash-frozen at sea right after catching retains the quality and flavor or fresh-caught fish.

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng