Free 100 Million Years of Food by Stephen Le Page A

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    Thierry runs a project with Cooke in an effort to mitigate environmental concerns. He grows seaweed near the salmon pens. The concept, known as IMTA (integrated multitrophic aquaculture), centers on the idea of putting together plants and aquatic animals that work symbiotically. Thierry’s plan is that seaweed and mussels will absorb the fecal and food wastes from the fish pens, recycling the nutrients and also providing another marketable product. Thierry has his work cut out for him, however. Aside from industrial uses, such as providing carrageenans that are widely used as food thickeners and stabilizers, seaweed does not play a significant role in most Western diets—or not yet, at least. The new craze for sushi is gradually introducing Westerners to Japanese and Korean use of seaweed for crispy rice wrappers, sour and spicy salads, and heartening soups. Thierry points out that IMTA is more than just salmon, seaweed, and mussels; in theory, there are an infinite variety of plants and animals that could be usefully employed in conjunction with aquaculture, cleaning up the environment and providing food and other useful industrial products. Thierry believes IMTA could be done in closed-water systems as well.
    Environmental groups are pushing hard to make aquaculture farms move their salmon operations inland. I drive out on a drizzly afternoon to meet with Inka Milewski, science advisor at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, at her farm. Thin and thoughtful, she shows me pictures that she took of an abandoned fish farm: The seafloor beneath was covered in a filthy gray mat of bacteria; bubbles of sulphide gas streamed to the surface. Inka says inland fish farms are better than open-water fish pens, but she would prefer that there be no aquaculture at all. “We can’t play God with nature,” she says emphatically. Indeed, some studies have observed that inland fish farms have just as great an environmental impact as open-water fish farms, or worse, due to the energy and water inputs necessary to sustain the inland farms.
    But where does this leave us? If we go with a system like SeaChoice and carry around a card whenever we buy seafood, the criteria seem overwhelming. For instance, wild Alaskan salmon is labeled as good, but Atlantic salmon and farmed salmon anywhere are bad, except Coho land-farmed salmon from the United States, which is permissible, and wild salmon from the Pacific Coast, which is designated as Yellow, Some Concern. With cod, the criteria are even more obscure: Consumers are advised to avoid Atlantic cod (from Canada) and Pacific cod (from Russia and Japan), but Pacific longline-caught cod from Alaska is considered okay, while Pacific bottom-trawl cod from the United States or British Columbia carries the Some Concern warning. Whew! And those are just two items out of a list of thirty-four seafood species.
    However, some sort of action is imperative if we want future generations to have the same opportunities to eat wild fish. Fish catches worldwide peaked in the late 1980s and have since declined. Scientists have pointed out an analogy with forests, in which developed countries were able to increase forest cover due to populations shifting from the countryside to towns and increased environmental awareness; similarly, developed countries have established relatively good control over fisheries within their borders, but the long-term prospects of fisheries in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia are bleak. 19
    Consumer choice is a powerful tool in this regard. Fears of PCB and mercury contamination put a dent in appetites for salmon until the industry learned how to remove the pollutants. In a globalized marketplace, we can achieve better omega-3/omega-6 balance without devastating large fish stocks by selecting smaller animals within the aquatic food chain (such as smaller, bonier fish and jellyfish), by consuming more sustainable land-based animals that have better