Something Smells Fishy

In the "you can never win" category of food politics, there was an interesting Op Ed by Paul Greenberg in the New York Times last week on the facts about fish oil. It seems many of us have added fish oil supplements to our diets, rather than eating fish. I can understand, since certain fish have been overfished, and others contain high levels of mercury that can be harmful to humans. So in order to get the recommended Omega-3's, people have been purchasing supplements. But, how are the supplements made? Well, according to the article, "a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, when a recent book identifies in its title as "The Most Important Fish in the Sea."" And that is a problem.

Why? Because many of the fish we like to eat (and are trying to protect from overfishing) eat menhaden. "Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden." And so it turns out we're now overfishing menhaden, and that means we could be dooming the other fish we like to eat, which we were trying to protect from extinction by overfishing, to extinction by starvation. Not only that, but because the menhaden perform a water filtration function ("an adult menhaden can rid four to six gallons of water of algae in a minute"), it appears that the overfishing of menhaden to produce fish oil is also contributing to increasingly dirty waters.

So what does this this all mean to me? Well, for one, it's frustrating to know that in our attempt to keep certain fish from being endangered or extinct, we are at best inadvertently (I'll give the fish oil company cited in the article the benefit of the doubt) overfishing an unheard-of fish that is a major link in the food chain whose extinction could lead to the extinction of several other, more popularly-known fish. Second, it's interesting to note that a high concentration of omega-3s (even higher than in fish oil) may be found in flaxseed oil, which takes no fish to make. Of course, now that I say that, I wonder what a substantial increase in flaxseed oil demand would do mean for sustainable agriculture...