Section » Aquaculture

Fish tale: Walmart’s sustainable seafood pledge has a long way to go

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on September 2, 2010

When big corporations make pledges to improve their sourcing practices, it's important to hold them accountable. After all, it's easy to hold a press conference pledging a new green policy; it's not so easy to fulfill the pledge. This was one of the action points in an article

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Grow vacancies: Gene Fredericks is thinking inside the city’s big box

By Bonnie Azab Powell • on September 1, 2010

They're the bane of urban and suburban areas alike: the vacant, boarded-up K-Marts and Home Depot Expos, squatting like concrete cowpies amidst a landscape of weedy parking lots. But where most people

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Russ Parsons on ‘Four Fish’ — the one food-politics book to read

By Ethicurean • on July 20, 2010

Net prophet: "There are few things in life more complicated than sorting through the various ethical implications of which fish you should be eating," writes Russ Parsons in this review of Four

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A focus on fish meal and subsidies can help the oceans

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on March 29, 2010

This is part 3 of a series on improving market-based seafood sustainability initiatives, inspired by a recent article published by an international team of researchers in "Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation." (See Oryx volume 44, pp. 45-56 doi:10.1017/S0030605309990470.

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Here’s the catch: More sustainable seafood requires exerting pressure up the supply chain

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on March 2, 2010

This is part 2 of a series on improving market-based seafood sustainability initiatives, inspired by a recent article published by an international team of researchers in "Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation." (See Oryx volume 44, pp. 45-56 doi:10.1017/S0030605309990470.

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There Be Dragons: Examining the alternatives to unsustainable aquaculture fish feed

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on November 22, 2009

February 23, 2010 update: I discovered that the credit for the grasshopper photo was incorrect. The photo is actually from tazintosh's Flickr collection and the photo's Flickr page is

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New research on aquaculture industry reveals murky waters surrounding fish-feed issue

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on October 19, 2009

The products of aquaculture, the farming of sea creatures and plants, are often divided into "bad fish" — piscavores, like salmon, that eat more pounds of protein in the form of other fish than they yield — and "good fish," omnivores like tilapia and carp that can survive on plant matter. A new

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Nobu’s no-no: The rise and fall of the bluefin tuna

By Marc R. aka Mental Masala • on June 12, 2009

With the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin stocks plummeting to shockingly low levels, chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa (24 prestigious restaurants around the world) is under pressure from a battalion of critics to remove the fish from his menu until populations are sustainable. So far, Nobu's restaurants

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Can aquaculture feed the world with protein sustainably?

By Ethicurean • on June 4, 2009

Swimming in controversy: In a world of growing population and shrinking ocean resources, aquaculture is often touted as a necessary tool for food production. And yet many criticize the damage that aquaculture does to wild ecosystems, its use of chemicals, and other unsavory practices. Environmental Health

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Farmed fish have low levels of PCBs and other toxins

By Ethicurean • on June 4, 2009

One win for aquaculture…some, anyway: Scientists from the Netherlands measured concentrations of several halogenated toxins in tilapia, pangasius, shrimp, salmon, trout, and shrimp that were farmed in several places around the world. Such toxins included Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine

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