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Consumers Wrestle With Mixed Seafood Messages By J.R. Pegg WASHINGTON, DC, February 20, 2003 (ENS) - There is a wealth of information about seafood for Americans to wade through but most just want a clear answer to one question: What seafood should I eat? That question is easily answered, according to Dr. William Hogarth, assistant administrator for fisheries at the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). "If the seafood is on the market, the American public should be happy to eat it," Hogarth said. Yet other seafood experts participating in a panel discussion Wednesday at the National Press Club are not so sure.
American seafood choices have health, environmental and economic consequences. (Photo courtesy Clemson Catering)Consumers face competing and often misleading messages and statistics from advocacy, industry and government voices, panelists said, and the economics, health concerns and environmental impact of the U.S. seafood industry are not easily balanced.Driven by increased insight into the health benefits of seafood, the American appetite for it is increasing. On average, Americans eat some 15 pounds of seafood a year. There are clear health benefits from seafood, but they come with a "unique set of food safety risks," according to Charlotte Christin, senior food safety attorney at the Center of Science in the Public Interest (CPSI). The health risks are harder to manage because seafood is usually caught in the wild, Christin said. There are hundreds of edible species with unique and specific risks. CPSI found seafood the leading cause of food poisoning outbreaks. Much of the seafood consumed by Americans is imported and rarely inspected, Christin said. The U.S. imports more than four billion pounds of seafood annually from some 160 countries, but less than two percent of all imported food is inspected by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials. The FDA's seafood Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point regulations went into effect four years ago, but Christin says they are poorly implemented and enforced. The lack of international cooperation and the poorly implemented national regulatory regime are mirrored in the management of the U.S. seafood supply. Management of the American seafood industry, which is valued at some $50 billion annually, is more often about economics and politics than about safety and sustainability, several panelists said. The overriding challenge is too many boats chasing too few fish. "The capacity of the fishing industry is too high," Hogarth said. "We need sustainability for the industry and the fish." Reducing the capacity of the U.S. fishing fleet won't be easy, he warned. Hogarth estimated that 55 percent of the boats catching shrimp in the Gulf Coast could be removed and the remaining vessels "could harvest the same amount of fish."
There are too many boats chasing Gulf Coast shrimp. (Photo courtesy City of Corpus Christi)"For every job on a boat, there are six and a half more jobs on land that support it," said Roger Berkowitz, president and CEO of Legal Sea Foods, a $150 million chain of 26 restaurants which sponsored the Wednesday discussion. "We need to incentivize smaller boats."Finding sustainability for fishermen is shadowed by the more daunting task of understanding the sustainability of fish populations. The primary challenge is a lack of information. NMFS reports that it does not know the status of 76 percent of U.S. fish stocks. The panel, including Hogarth, said the agency lacks funding and manpower to perform its tasks adequately. The environmental and economic pressures on harvesting fish from the wild mean that farm raised fish will have a large role in the future of seafood. Without it, the world will "never be able to keep up with the growing demand for seafood," said Ocean Trust CEO Thor Lassen. Ocean Trust, Lassen said, is a marine conservation foundation based in Virginia. The United States has not embraced fish farming to the extent of others, but the American public does not seem to have a problem with it. Some 80 percent of salmon consumed in the United States is farm raised, yet conservationists worry about the growth of global aquaculture. But WWF, the conservation organization, released a report Tuesday warning that the global demand for fish feed is threatening already pressured wild fish populations. The report finds that the international aquaculture industry could be using all of the world's fish oil and half of its fishmeal by 2010. WWF estimates that four kilograms of wild caught fish are needed to produce one kilogram of farm fish. Some in the industry are beginning to explore genetically engineered fish, raising concerns about the human health and environmental consequences of tampering with the genetic makeup of fishes. The American seafood industry has yet to take transgenic fish out of the research stage, but conservationists are wary of the environmental risks that could emerge if any of these fish escape into the wild to interbreed with wild fish species. Gaps in the FDA's regulatory process, Christin argued, have the potential to undermine any decision the agency might make on genetically engineered fish. She called on Congress to give the FDA the authority to analyze and address the environmental effects of transgenic fish and require that the agency do this in a transparent and participatory manner. "The public will not embrace those decisions if they are made in secret," Christin said. Despite the educational work of public health organizations, environmentalists and government officials, many Americans decide what seafood to eat based solely on taste. And the individuals with measurable authority to influence the public's palate are chefs and restaurateurs. "Chefs have created new markets for seafood," said panel moderator Michael Batterberry, founder of "Food & Wine" and "Food Arts" magazines. "They are driving seafood choices." Batterberry cited redfish, Norwegian salmon, swordfish and Chilean Sea Bass as a few examples of fish seldom eaten by Americans before they were popularized in restaurants.
New Orleans chef Paul Prudehomme opened the American appetite to redfish. (Photo courtesy Louisiana State University)But chefs should not use their influence to drive public choices about seafood, Hogarth said. He argued that the Give Swordfish a Break Campaign, launched in 1998 by SeaWeb, the Natural Resources Defense Council and a long list of well known chefs, resulted in "unintended economic consequences" that did more harm than good. The slumping domestic demand for swordfish forced the industry to sell and catch more fish for the international market, said Berkowitz. Legal Sea Foods did not support the ban, which Berkowitz said was unnecessary and confused consumers. The National Marine Fisheries Service has a plan to bring the swordfish species back to sustainable levels, Hogarth said, and it was successful despite the Give Swordfish a Break campaign. "To say you shouldn't eat an overfished stock is wrong," he said. "Management works. We can rebuild stocks." Some environmentalists, including Ocean Trust's Lassen, are wary of the effectiveness of campaigns or boycotts. "We need to focus our management in the oceans, not the grocery store or the restaurant," he said. But supporters of the Give Swordfish a Break campaign maintain said it was necessary because NMFS and other government agencies have such a poor track record managing the nation's marine resources. New York chef and restaurateur Rick Moonen was a vocal leader of the swordfish campaign, which he said was necessary and successful. "Someone has to take responsibility and set an example," he said. "The fact is, something changed." Moonen argues the public interest in the swordfish campaign helped pressure the government into more decisive action. In 1999, international quota restrictions were adopted, and the campaign officially ended in August 2000 when the U.S. government closed swordfish nursery areas in U.S. waters to fishing vessels. The preliminary assessment last fall by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas found the swordfish have increased from a level of 65 percent of their healthy population size to 94 percent. The Give Swordfish a Break campaign, said Batterberry, helped demonstrate to the public "the concept that fish could be endangered."
Food & Wine magazine founder Michael Batterberry believes the swordfish campaign helped put seafood issues in front of the American public. (Photo courtesy U.S. Pastry Alliance)"It raised seafood as an issue worthy of consideration," he said.The popularity of the Give Swordfish a Break campaign helped spark a recent effort to warn consumers away from Chilean sea bass, also known as Patagonian toothfish. Berkowitz and Moonen both said they support the ban. The swordfish campaign showed that boycotts can be effective, added Christin, but she argued in favor of campaigns with a positive message. In July 2001, the Center of Science in the Public Interest launched its Serving Safer Shellfish campaign to encourage the food industry to use only raw shellfish from cold waters or Gulf Coast shellfish that have been processed to eliminate the Vibrio vulnificus bacteria. Some 100 others have joined the Serving Safer Shellfish campaign. Legal Sea Foods was a founding member. Consumers have demonstrated a willingness to pay more for organic and sustainably produced food, several panelists pointed out, and the same is true for seafood. Berkowitz and Moonen see the Marine Stewardship Council, an international nonprofit organization based in England that has developed a standard for sustainable fisheries, as a potential step in the right direction. "We need to target fisheries doing the right thing," Berkowitz said, "and label them as such." Both restaurateurs encouraged consumers to take an active role and to ask for more information about the seafood they eat. "The government does not make policy changes based on environmental groups," Moonen said. "It listens to the public." For more information on seafood consumption advice, see: |
