Dolphin-Friendly Tuna? Don't Believe It - Independent (UK)

[hatrack]

EDIT

Every chunk of tuna comes from a wild fish. Because tuna are wide-ranging, fast-moving ocean fish, fisheries have developed awesome techniques for catching them. Fleets use vast purse-seine nets to scoop them out of the sea, while Japanese vessels, in particular, trail lines of baited hooks many miles long. Such methods are undiscriminating. The bycatch - that is, the non-target species - routinely includes sharks, turtles and albatrosses. The ratio is about four sharks caught for every tuna. According to the Shark Trust, longlines operating off New Zealand have snapped up 450,000 blue sharks in 10 years.

There are now ominous signs that the targeted catch is also in trouble. The fish everyone wants to find in their net is the bluefin tuna. There are two closely related species, one in the northern oceans and the other in the southern seas. Both are magnificent fish. They grow up to two metres long and can weigh 500kg. Yet, despite their bulk, they are among the fittest, fastest beings in the ocean: sleek, warm-blooded and the ultimate in fishy power.

Two things are combining to bring down the bluefin. One is their slow breeding rate -they take at least 10 years to become sexually mature, and so are vulnerable to overfishing. The other problem is that bluefin are expensive. A full-sized fish can fetch tens of thousands of dollars. And a market that was once centred in Japan is widening by the year. Many countries, including Britain, have acquired a taste for sashimi - thin slivers of raw tuna dunked in soya sauce. Last year we imported 1,600 tons of the stuff, worth £8.6m. But that is small beer compared with the potential market in China, where a fast-growing middle class eyes bluefin sushi as the ultimate gastronomic status symbol.

This isn't sustainable. Although bluefin can be farmed, no one has yet worked out a way of rearing them from eggs. All farmed tuna are simply wild-caught from the sea and fattened up. But stocks are becoming dangerously depleted. Catches around the Balearic Islands are down to just 15 per cent of what they were a decade ago, and six Spanish tuna farms have gone out of business.

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=61883

[jilln]

1. I only eat

tuna-friendly tuno :-D

[LeftyMom]

2. Is that any good?

I've never actually had any.

[jilln]

3. I've been vegetarian for a long time, but tuno is so much like tuna...

(or at least how I remember tuna) that it's hard for me to eat. When I buy it (in a can - people say the frozen stuff is better but I've never had it) what usually happens is I make myself one sandwich and give the rest to the dogs (who LOVE it) because it's so fishy it feels like I'm eating meat.

If you try it, let me know what you think!

[LeftyMom]

4. I run into the same issue with substitutes

If they're too realistic I find them a bit creepy. My son loves faux chicken patties, but I find them entirely too much like the real thing and won't eat them. I that's one advantage of being vegan from infancy, he hasn't a clue what an actual peice if chicken muscle is like, and at his age only the vaugest awareness that people eat such things (and a wide eyed horror about it when it sinks in.)

I'll have to get some at Whole Paycheck, I don't think the food co-op here has it anymore, though they used to. I'll be sure to post about it though, I try to post a review in the veg group when I try something new.

[jilln]

5. The first time I had chickeny seitan...

was on a plane. I KNEW it wasn't chicken because the guy next to me had real chicken, but it was so similar that I couldn't eat more than a bite or so. Now I like the chickeny seitan stuff, and I wish Morningstar would make their chicken nuggets vegan already.

There's a restaurant in my city that used to make vegan omelets. Not sure how they did it, but they were so eggy I could not eat that either.

Sounds like your son is a lucky boy ;-)