Eat fish in the last few days? Unless you fished it yourself, chances are it wasn’t from the United States. Today, 91 percent of the seafood that we eat comes from abroad, according to Paul Greenberg, author of American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood.
You could assume that maybe this has to do with demand, that the supply of local seafood isn’t enough. And yet, surprisingly enough, one-third of the seafood that Americans catch gets sold to other countries. What gives?
Greenberg calls this the “fish swap.”
“What we’re doing is we’re sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad, and in exchange, we’re importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature,” Greenberg told Terry Gross in an NPR interview. “We export millions of tons of wild, mostly Alaska salmon abroad and import mostly farmed salmon from abroad. So salmon for salmon, we’re trading wild for farmed.”
More
DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
9 comments:
we won't eat farmed anything.
just like gortons, ms pauls most of the name brands and others come from over seas and not from here.
I get mine from the ocean and bay. Either I catch it, or I don't eat it.
Sooooo, how does one know that they are buying the swapped farm stuff?
I would much rather buy the local-caught-from-the-wild and help our own watermen...
Sadly, unless you grow and process all your food, you're eating farmed something!
I worked at a Refrigerated warehouse loading trucks and saw pallets and pallets of shrimp from about every maritime country on earth : Malaysia, Vietnam, Chile,Indonesia, Philippines, Mexico, etc...
And the reason we don't have numerous shrimp farms in the US is..........
bob pinto, the reason is because of companies like Mrs Paul's. They have made sure the industry is over regulated so as to rid the smaller competition. Since the advent of anti trust laws, Big Business has turned to the EPA and the USDA to regulate smaller companies out of their way.
950
It is because we don't farm them! Or at least not to the same degree! Wild caught are more expensive and more scarce. We have ourselves to thank for that. You are simply seeing the results of 100 years of over fishing confronted with subsequent over regulation. If this happens to fish, which naturally reproduce, I don't want to see what may happen to oil, which cannot reproduce.
Scarey situations!!!
Post a Comment