Submitted Ideas
1
How could we make seafood at lower trophic levels more appealing to consumers?
Posted by Richard Joyce | Maine, United States
Tuna, swordfish, shark, salmon... Humans like to eat seafood from near the top of the food-chain. Smaller, more plentiful fish are used as bait, turned into fertilizer, and even fed to livestock. Should we be promoting fish like herring and sardines as an alternative to overfished species higher up on the food-chain?
To promote fish from lower trophic levels, you may argue that they are much less contaminated with PCB, heavy metals and pesticides than fish from upper trophic levels.
These anthropogenic pollutants are now widespread in all oceans, fortunately in very dilute form. But, each time a fish eats an other one, the concentration of these pollutants is almost tenfold. So imagine yourself eating swordfish,which ate tuna, which ate salmon, which ate herring, which ate sardine…
Matthias Heilweck