Fish

Vegetarians often have a hierarchy of meat if they have to eat it. Usually fish and seafood is the first choice, then chicken or some other kind of poultry, and then beef or pork only if absolutely necessary for some reason. I have generally followed these guidelines, but lately I've been seriously rethinking them. In part, I've been rethinking this because they don't actually make any intrinsic sense to me and thus I can't think of any actual good reason to continue this. But also I am deeply bothered by the consumption of fish. Much more so than cows or pigs. I think part of the reason that vegetarians or near-vegetarians will eat fish is because they are not generally raised in a farm setting. Or at least you can get wild fish.

But is this a good reason? Increasingly, I am thinking that in fact it is a very bad reason. Fish stocks across the world are plummeting. Cows and pigs may be raised in terrible conditions and that's a bad thing. But at least they aren't going extinct. World fish consumption continues to rise, in no small part because of what Americans eat. This New York Times article from yesterday on increasing consumption and declining populations of bluefin tuna made me think even more about this.

The idea that catching and eating fish is more humane that factory farming beef is probably true. This shouldn't take away from the pretty damn brutal way that fish are killed, a process usually far worse than hunting assuming the shooter gets a clean shot and knows what they're doing. But nonetheless, how can we use this as justification for eating fish? I think this gets back to our veneration of a wild nature over human-controlled landscapes. The fact is that every landscape is deeply human controlled at this point in history. As wild as a place seems, it's always changing due to humans. Eating wild caught fish does not bring us closer to come kind of nature. For one thing, it's highly unusual for us to actually catch these fish. Second, when fish like the bluefin or sea bass are caught at a rate that leads to depletion, aren't we in fact hurting the world far more than we are if we eat factory-farm produced cows? That is not to say that factory farming isn't bad; in fact it is very bad. But to send an animal, and particularly one that lives in a extraordinarily complex and poorly understood ecosystem like the ocean, toward extinction seems to me to both be stupid for humans, because it eliminates a future food source, and yet another human-caused depletion of the earth's diversity.

So as for me, though I'd generally prefer to eat no meat, I think it's more responsible to eat either farm-raised fish or even farm-raised beef than a tasty piece of bluefin sushi. It's contrary to a lot of vegetarian and environmental norms, but I think it just makes sense.