I absolutely love fish. In general, I've never been big on generic seafood (shrimp, scallops, crabs, oysters, etc.) but I've always loved fish. (Oh, the occasional shrimp dish or soft-shell crab sandwich is lovely, but it tends to be more of a sea-coast vacation thing than anything I would eat at home.)

The catch (heh-heh) is that some fish are bad for you to eat. Some of them are bad because of chemical or mercury poisoning, some are bad because of the fishing methods used to catch them, and some are bad because we're fishing them to extinction.

There are several places you can go to get information, my current favorites being the Moneteray Bay Aquarium's website and the Blue Ocean Institute because they not only tell you which fish they think are good and bad for you to eat, but they also tell you why.

So you can go to those sites and check them out on your own, but here are a few of the ugly/bad/good choices to get you started (though this is mostly for me, so I have a place to check quickly and remind me later...):

Ugly (aka, Really Bad Idea)

• Orange Roughy This is a long-living deep water fish, that breeds very slowly. If you eat Orange Roughy the fish you're eating is probably older than you are--even if you're a grandmother. It seems to be wildly popular at the moment, and the species is already heading towards extinction. Also, since it is such a deep-water fish, the method used to catch it rips up the sea-bed, screwing up the eco-system for the uncaught orange roughy as well as other fish.


• Salmon This one really saddens me, as I love salmon. Unfortunately most of the salmon you'll find in the Northeast is farm raised--even if it says "Atlantic" it usually means farm-raised Atlantic--wild Atlantic salmon is "commercially extinct" due to over-fishing. Salmon farms create incredible amounts of waste and serve as a breeding ground for parasites. The pollution and waste from the farms are killing off the wild fish populations. As an exception to the rule, Alaskan Salmon is fantastic--very eco-friendly and no mercury, but not easy to get. Sean used to work in Alaska, specifically with sorting and freezing various fish for shipments elsewhere, and he said that except for the pink salmon, all the salmon he ever dealt with went to Japan for sushi (he said that the pink salmon was canned like tuna and shipped to the lower states). Any wild-caught salmon seems to be okay if it really is wild-caught--make sure the package tells you it's wild salmon.

Bad Idea

• Tuna I've known this for a while and still I eat it anyway. Most tuna breed fast so you'd think this would be a good choice, but even the dolphin safe fishing methods used for tuna kill a lot of other sea-life in the process. Also, tuna (especially albacore) is on the serious mercury poisoning list. Chunk-light tuna is some of the safest. Tuna is the guilty pleasure I tend to buy anyway.

Good Idea

• Mahi Mahi I love Mahi Mahi, they have it in the frozen section at Kroger. It's caught in relatively, though not completely, eco-friendly ways and is low on the mercury poisoning lists. Also its population has been holding steady despite being fished--but we'll need to keep an eye on this one because it hasn't been thoroughly enough researched for some experts. So far so good, however.


• Tilapia Super eco-friendly fish that can be farm-raised cleanly almost everywhere, with no mercury poisoning. The all-around winner.


• Anything Alaskan You'll probably never see Alaskan fish in WV, but you western readers take note! Alaska is very strict about its fishing industry controls. That means that even fish typically a no-no are fine to eat if they're Alaskan. Go Alaska!

Nowhere near a comprehensive list, but something to think on. Remember to check several different sites--there are often conflicting opinions on what's okay, and it's better to get the full story. The above commentaries are my own, gleaned from the two sources named above and from various other places on the web, including the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Okay, so I had to get a serious entry in here.