How oil spills, trash affect our seafood

List of West Coast seafoods to AVOID:

  • Caviar, Sturgeon (imported wild)
  • Chilean Seabass/Toothfish
  • Cod: Atlantic , imported Pacific
  • Cobia (imported farmed)
  • Crab: King (imported)
  • Dogfish (US)
  • Grenadier/Pacific Roughy
  • Lobster: Spiny ( Caribbean)
  • Mahi Mahi/Dolphinfish (imported)
  • Marlin: Blue, Striped
  • Monkfish
  • Orange Roughy
  • Rockfish (trawled)
  • Salmon (farmed, including Atlantic )
  • Sharks
  • Shrimp (imported)
  • Swordfish (imported)
  • Tilapia (Asia farmed)
  • Tuna: Albacore, Bigeye, Yellowfin (longline)
  • Tuna: Bluefin, Tongol, Canned (except Albacore and Skipjack)
  • Yellowtail (imported farmed)
SHORTER List of West Coast seafoods to AVOID:
  • Caviar, Sturgeon (imported wild)
  • Chilean Seabass/Toothfish
  • Cod: Atlantic, imported Pacific
  • Crab: King (imported)
  • Mahi Mahi/Dolphinfish (imported)v
  • Marlin: Blue, Striped
  • Monkfish
  • Orange Roughy
  • Rockfish (trawled)
  • Salmon (farmed, including Atlantic )
  • Sharks
  • Shrimp (imported)
  • Swordfish (imported)
  • Tilapia ( Asia farmed)
  • Tuna: Albacore, Bigeye, Yellowfin (longline)
  • Tuna: Bluefin, Tongol, Canned (except Albacore and Skipjack)
Key messages:
  1. Our individual seafood choices really make a difference for the health of the oceans. We're voting with our dollars and our forks each time we choose sustainable seafood.

  2. The easiest way to make choices that are good for you, and good for the oceans, is to get and use the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch pocket guide. It's also available as an iPhone app, and in a mobile version.

  3. The oceans need our help if we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in a world that has oceans as rich with marine life as we've enjoyed.

  4. Our fishing and fish-farming practices have a huge impact on the health of the oceans. Most of the big fish in the ocean are gone - fished out over the years to feed our growing demand.

  5. Things can change and the oceans can rebound - but we need to act now.

  6. The seafood choice we make as individuals can REALLY have an impact. Every time we buy seafood, we're voting with our dollars for healthy oceans - and businesses are listening.

  7. Seafood Watch draws a clear connection between all of our food choices and the health of the environment on which not just fish but all of us depend.

  8. Choosing organic or sustainably farmed food from land means fewer chemicals get into lakes, streams and rivers. That means fewer chemicals in the ocean. It's all connected.

  9. Buying sustainable, organic AND local also means we need less energy to put food on our table - a critical issue as we try to feed ourselves without contributing further to global climate change.
Related links:

Best info for consumers is our pocket guide. Order the correct version for your region or our pocket guide to sushi, click here

Best info for professional chefs, with all regional recommendations in one place, is our Buyer's Guide

Interested in doing more to help preserve our ocean? Join our Seafood Watch advocate program! Our tips and downloadable materials make it easy to learn more and spread the word about sustainable seafood in your community.

For more information, visit www.montereybayaquarium.org

Follow Seafood Watch on Twitter
Find Seafood Watch on Facebook

For more information about Annieglass, visit www.annieglass.com
Find Annieglass on Facebook
Follow Annieglass on Twitter

About Seafood Watch:

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program was created in 1999 as a way to transform the market for seafood in ways that create incentives for sustainable wild-caught fisheries and aquaculture operations. It has since then become the best know and most respected seafood recommendation program in the country.

We began by focusing on individual consumers, and developed the Seafood Watch pocket guides distributed nationally, through our website and by more than 200 partner organizations around the country. We've distributed over 32 million pocket guides since then, including more than 9 million that were inserted with Happy Feet DVDs sold in the U.S. and Canada.

Each of our recommendations is developed through a rigorous, peer-reviewed process grounded in the best available science, and reflects our vision of having oceans that support healthy, diverse marine ecosystems capable of producing seafood to meet human needs for generations to come.

In recent years, we've put more emphasis on working with big businesses - the major seafood buyers like supermarkets, food service companies and restaurants whose buying decisions can have immediate and dramatic impacts on the marketplace.

We're partners with Bon Appetit Management Co., which provides food service at the Aquarium and for more than 400 clients nationwide at cultural institutions, colleges and corporate headquarters; and with Bon Appetit's parent company, Compass Group North America, the largest food service company in the U.S. and Canada .

We're also partners with ARAMARK - one of the largest food service providers in the world - that will move its seafood purchases to sustainable sources over the next decade. And we have dozens of restaurant partners, and thousands of Seafood Watch Advocates, working with us to make a difference.

About Sheila Bowman:

Sheila Bowman has been with the Monterey Bay Aquarium for 15 years, working in education and membership before taking her current position.

As the Seafood Watch program's Senior Outreach Manager, Sheila works with over 190 aquarium, zoo, business and restaurant partners across the country where she provides training and education and helps them develop the programs and materials they can use to educate their customers and visitors to promote ocean-friendly seafood.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium launched the Seafood Watch program in 2000 in response to visitor's questions about an aquarium exhibit, "Fishing for Solutions", that focused on critical fishery issues including bycatch, habitat damage and overfishing.

Since its inception, Seafood Watch has researched over 130 seafood items and has developed pocket guides with regional recommendations for the entire U.S. as well as one specific to seafood found in the sushi market.

Over 36 million Seafood Watch pocket guides have been distributed to date. Since its launch in 2009 the Seafood Watch iPhone app has been downloaded over 200,000 times.

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