Fishy business at the grocery store

Tonight I ate a tasty meal of catfish, corn on the cob and sauteed new potatoes. I haven't cooked with catfish before, so I was pleasantly surprised that it was flaky with no fishy taste at all. I bought it because it was a good price.

But the week before at the grocery store, I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out what fish purchase would be best for the environment and my wallet. I couldn't believe how many choices I faced: salmon from China, Chile, Canada and the US. Shrimp from Indonesia. Chilean sea bass. US snapper. I must have looked a little odd staring at the fine print on signs and scribbling notes on my shopping list, to eventually settle upon farm-raised salmon from Canada that was $4.50 for a six-ounce piece.

That was a compromise. Decent price, neighboring country. The best deal was farm-raised salmon from China (on sale for $3.99 a pound). Or I could have splurged on the deep red Sockeye salmon from Alaska's Cooper River for $24.99 a pound.

That variety of price and origination demonstrates the complexity of something as simple as buying fish in the grocery store. A while back, my coworker forwarded a Washington Post article to me about the "greenest" fish to buy but I only glanced at it because the answer made my eyes glaze over (avoid species that are overfished, but also consider the carbon footprint from feed production and fishing methods, avoid fish that has been flown in from far away). Reading it over again, according to the article, the pricey Alaskan salmon would have been the best choice. The article noted that the Seafood Watch program gave high marks to wild-caught Alaskan salmon, canned albacore tuna (I do buy that!) and farmed rainbow trout.

But that's not realistic for most people, especially families on a budget, even though I'm sure that Cooper River salmon tasted great (I was almost a bit of an Alaskan salmon expert since I worked one summer in a fishing cannery, but at the time I didn't like salmon and never ate the fresh King salmon cooked for us on Fridays. Oh youthful ignorance.).

Beyond salmon, this paragraph was insightful, although following it would require changing my fish-eating habits (Sardines? Uh, do I have to?): "For an easy way to cut your seafood-related emissions, try to shift your diet toward farmed oysters, mussels and clams, shellfish that don't require processed feed. (They eat plankton instead.) Many experts also recommend that you make like a European and learn to love smaller, schooling fish such as sardines, anchovies and mackerel. They're easier to catch than big bottom-dwelling carnivores such as cod and haddock, meaning less fuel is expended to harvest them. (Plus, since they're lower on the food chain, they're naturally more energy-efficient.) Generally speaking, fish with abundant populations are easier to harvest, meaning that choosing fish from well-managed stocks is likely to cut your emissions as well."

So for now, I'll try to do more research into this confusing subject (the article didn't take into account mercury levels, for example) but in the meantime I think US or Canadian farm-raised salmon might be the best compromise.