Seafood could be a sustainable food source. The problem is that we rely on a small variety of fish and seafood in the UK so numbers cannot replenish compared to what we take from the sea.
Most of the fish available to buy is industrially fished by huge supertrawlers of over 100m in length. As with meat, this is the way seafood is kept cheap and so available. Supertrawlers can catch hundreds of tonnes of fish every day using nets up to a mile long, they can process and freeze the fish onboard so they can spend months at a time at sea.
source: Greenpeace
Farmed fish
Every year the Scottish farmed salmon industry uses around 460,000 tonnes of wild fish to make fish oil to feed to farmed salmon, resulting in around 179,000 tonnes of farmed salmon. This fish is caught around the coast of Africa and Asia depriving communities of food and livelihoods.
Feedback Global: wasteful Scottish fish farms
Find out more about sustainable seafood from The Sustainable Food Trust
The best way to eat fish sustainably is to talk to your local fish shop and find out where the seafood comes from, or to catch it yourself.
The plastic pollution caused by fishing is another story.