January 05, 2006

Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch. Tasty environmentalism! Which is, as we all know, the best kind.
  • Nice I'd forgotten about this site and it's handy-and-compact pocket guide. Seared tuna, hold the mercury please.
  • Does this mean you can go to the aquarium and pick out your dinner ala steakhouse lobster tank?
  • Nooooo.
  • I always thought it was a bit odd that every cafeteria in every aquarium I've ever been to sells seafood of one kind or another [1]. It feels akin to standing outside the panda enclosure at the zoo and saying, 'I don't know, the one on the left looks a liiiittle gamey. I think I'll take the one on the right, because he's the cutest. And can I get a soda with that?' [1] Obviously my sample is rather small, since I think I've been to a total of 3 aquariums.
  • After visiting an aquarium, I can assure you I'm not having the seared-thing-I-just-saw. Although things are different after a trip to the coffeequarium.
  • The MB Aquarium restaurant is great -- I recommend it if you can get there, just because each table has a set of binoculars so you can watch the water out the window. I still have my seafood guide from our trip there in January although it doesn't apply so much in NZ. From memory, none of the fish in the aquarium were on the menu -- I checked. :)
  • I'm not going to click on this, cause I don't want to feel guilty/disturbed by the yummy lobster I ate the other night...
  • Totally SFL.
  • Keep these off my menu: raw fish, rhinos, ponies, cats of any stripe, manatees, turtles, dolphins, frogs, mussels, crabs, no friendly dogs, squids, manta rays, whales, monkeys with prehensile tails, the antelope, if he's a pronghorn, nor the dugong browsing all forlorn, the octopus, the harbour seal -- for me these make a dismal meal, and of course -- let me repeat -- I do not eat the Noble Horse.
  • Another sustainable fish eating guide with a UK/Euro focus can be found here. In the larger scheme of things, I don't think choosing your species wisely is going to make much of a difference. Humans are extracting 100 million metric tons of fish from the oceans each year [1] (not to mention ~20 million tons of by-catch discarded at sea [2]). No matter which way you slice it, that's unsustainable - at this rate, the ocean and just about everything in it is fscked. Enjoy your fish-eating ways while you still can people!