Farmed Fish Confidential: It's barbecue time

Do you know where your seafood has been?

By Steve Hahn
metrosantacruz.com

A cool breeze carries the sound of sizzling grills and popping wine corks across the bay: it's summer in Santa Cruz, and that means the time has come to eat, drink and be merry. But preparing for a summer feast can be a headache, especially for the environmentally minded host. And if fish is on the menu, forget it. Is there any fish species that isn't verboten for a sustainable barbecue anymore?

Pollution, habitat fragmentation and overfishing have caused some serious scientists to predict the collapse of most wild fisheries by 2050. Locally, seafood lovers can look at the decision to close the commercial salmon season along the entire West Coast this summer to get a sense of how this scenario might play out.

The cure for stressed wild fish stocks, many say, is more fish farms--a move akin to transitioning from hunting to cattle ranching. These operations are already part of humanity's diet and will be for the foreseeable future; fish farms made up over 32 percent of global seafood production in 2004, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and the industry has been growing at a rate of over 8 percent per year since 1970.

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