Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Sustainable seafood: Does fresh vs. frozen make a difference?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

The NY Times is running an op-ed, Catch of the Freezer, by a few ecological economists who were interested in learning whether it’s more sustainable to eat fresh or frozen  seafood.

Focusing on salmon as a case study, they suggest that it does matter.  Eat frozen when you can to reduce carbon emissions:

When it comes to salmon, the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon.

The reason: Most salmon consumers live far from where the fish was caught or farmed, and the majority of salmon fillets they buy are fresh and shipped by air, which is the world’s most carbon-intensive form of travel. Flying fillets from Alaska, British Columbia, Norway, Scotland or Chile so that 24 hours later they can be served “fresh” in New York adds an enormous climate burden, one that swamps the potential benefits of organic farming or sustainable fishing.

There are a lot of other important questions about sustainable seafood, including harvest rates, the industrialization and carbon intensity of the fishing process, genetic modification of farmed species, and organic pollutant loads in wild vs. farmed fish.  In terms of transportation and climate warming, this article offers a useful point of view, but I think their statement dismissing the importance of organic and wild vs. farmed is a bit parochial to a discussion of seafood sustainability writ large.  It depends on what part of sustainability—warming, human health, fish stocks, genetic alteration—matters most to you.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ / CC BY 2.0