Fish
With the past few months of warm weather, I’ve realized that my diet has gradually been changing, favoring lighter meals, fewer sweets, less caffeine, etc. Whenever the summer rolls around, my cravings for thick stews, hamgurgers (except the occasional bbq!), and breads really decreases.
I’ve been consciously trying to eat more vegetables by way of making salads and choosing vegetarian restaurants. Given all the health food stores, farmer’s markets, conscious people, and resources, there is really nothing extraordinary about keeping a healthy diet in the Bay Area and California. I know many vegatarians and a few vegans personally.
I recently read that Prince and Andre from Outkast are vegetarian, and for some reason that surprised me. I love eating chicken, fish, lamb, shrimp, but try not to do the pork and beef anymore. I’m finally realizing and letting go of the conviction that somehow the former industries are less harmful to the animals and the planet than the latter industries. Maybe I thought that for such a long time because I had a particular distaste for all the huge smelly, stinking cattle ranches up and down the central valley of California. Rarely have I ever seen a chicken ranch or watched huge fishing boats trough up the bottom of the sea floor for a few catches of shrimp or fish.
It’s funny to think this, but one of the most solid affirmations for my recent decision to go veggie came from the Wall Street Journal, of all places.
I read an article today about the seafood industry on the West Coast of Africa, and how in Muaritania, the government has leased out the rights to fish in its waters to other countries, mostly to China and European countries, in exchange for cash and sometimes goods, some of which are military equipment. This story just broke my heart.
It touched upon a number of political and economic issues, a lot that I never thought about. For instance, the local Mauritian fishing industry is much more sustainable to the marine ecosystem than the foreign fisheries. Without the huge boats and sophisticated methods of fisheries from more industrialized countries, the local fishing industry can not fish so far out to sea, an in effect gives the local ecosystem a safe haven and place to reproduce.
Another interesting aspect of this is how the local economy is effected. Of course fishermen are effected because they can’t catch and sell as many fish when they’re competing with bigger ships and wider nets. But because the food is being taken back to Europe and other countries, the local markets dwindle and people look for alternatives, often depending on charity.
Although the article is only available to subscriber’s I found this short video to accompany the piece. It can’t touch upon all the topics covered in the article, but it’s interesting to see the stark contrast between the local and foreign industries.
an quote from the article:
Wealthy countries subsidize their commercial fishermen to the tune of about $30 billion a year. Their goal is to keep their fishermen on the water. China, for example, provides $2 billion a year in fuel subsidies; the European Union and its member nations provide more than $7 billion of subsidies a year. Such policies boost the number of working boats, increase the global catch, and drive down fish prices. That makes it more difficult for fishermen in poor nations like Mauritania, who get no subsidies, to compete.
The end result: African waters are losing fish stock rapidly, with ramifications both to the economies of Africa’s coastal nations and to the world’s ocean ecology. Over the past three decades, the amount of fish in West African waters has declined by up to 50 percent, according to Daniel Pauly, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.