“We are grinding up a third of the ocean each year,” [author Paul] Greenberg told the diners at the Grand Banks, before the food was served. Greenberg was on hand to discuss the virtues of catches such as herring, mackerel, and butterfish, which, he said, are very high in omega-3 fatty acids (hence their value to the supplement industry), albeit bony and strongly flavored. “They are healthy to eat, but tricky to cook,” he said.
“What if we cut the forage fish take in half and instead paid fisherman twice as much for that catch, since it would be sold as valuable human food rather than cheap animal feed?” Greenberg later mused to me. “By the reasoning of the Lenfest report we’d also have more wild big fish.” He added, “Of course this is all very sort of economics-in-a-bottle type thinking. What would happen to the market for forage fish if their price doubled? It could possibly incentivize more people to catch them. But I think it’s possible to engineer a management regime where they wouldn’t.”
—John Donahue writing in The New Yorker about the health, environmental and economic benefits of eating the ocean’s smaller fish.
from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/13/fishing-lower-on-the-food-chain/
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