Tag Archives: fish

STILL FISHIN’

Braggart celebrity chef and eater Anthony Bourdain volunteered to eat the last blue fin tuna: “If there’s somebody to get the last piece of bluefin toro meat in the world, I guess I’m the best candidate,” he said in a Huffington Post interview.

Yup, if we need an End Times a**hole, Bourdain would do just fine.

I’ve been Googling around trying to find out what does happen when all the fish in the sea are gone. That IS the freeway we’re on. The big fish population is now 90 percent depleted from what it was in the ‘70s and 85 percent of the world’s fisheries are either gone or nearly gone.

It would be nice if we could blame it all on BP, plastic bottles, climate change and Anthony Bourdain. They are certainly contributing their fair share to the loss of sea life. But there’s another culprit and that would be us and our forks, and, in the case of a lot of tuna, our can-openers.

Overfishing. Now, there’s a word you don’t hear too often. We don’t hear it, because we don’t want to hear it. Governments around the world are subsidizing fishing fleets to the tune of $16 to $20 billion a year.

Now that there are less fish, these fleets are having to “modernize.” They’re using radar to pinpoint fishing schools with amazing accuracy. They’re also using huge, huge nets to strip the ocean floors bare. And us taxpayers are actually paying for that stupidity.

In her recent TED talk renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle said that a big predator fish like tuna, for example, is WAY more valuable to us alive than dead.

They call big fish “predator fish,” because, well, they eat the little fish, the ones that consume plankton. If the big fish aren’t eating the little fish and we end up with a whole bunch of little fish eating a whole lot of plankton…

YIKES! WE NEED PLANKTON. We really need plankton, it’s what’s providing half the world’s freaking oxygen. We need swimming tuna, Anthony, even that last one.

Well, why not just eat the little fish too? That’s one idea, but a bad idea. Say we eat all the little fish, what’s left? Jelly fish and bacteria. Oceans full of jelly fish. Blech!

I must admit, I loved salmon, especially teriyaki salmon. It just made me feel healthy to eat it. Even since I’ve gone vegan, I’ve thought well, maybe a fish oil capsule once in a while might be OK, just to be on the safe side. You know, omega 3’s and all.

Oh hell, I eat flax seeds instead.

There’s something about no oxygen and oceans full of jellyfish that scares me.

— A Vicious Vegan blog post —