Tip #66 Reduce your fish consumption

"Fish are friends, not food." Said Bruce, the shark, from Finding Nemo. And he was kinda right.

I’ve got inspired to share this tip after watching the new documentary on Netflix called Seaspiracy. The documentary made by the team behind the award-winning 2014 film Cowspiracy, which was backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, which pours doubt on the idea of sustainable fishing, shines a spotlight on the aquaculture industry and introduces the notion of “blood shrimp”, seafood tainted with slave labour and human rights abuses.

Even though it is said, that this document is a bit controversial and not all the details mentioned in the document are 100% accurate, we still should consider whether fish still should be an important part of our diet as it comes with many shocking facts. Let's see a few:

If you want to eat fish, you should focus on sourcing them from only local sources as industrial fishing leads to overfishing. It's a state when more fish are caught than the population can replace through natural reproduction. A typical fishing net is the size of 4 football pitches and can hold 16 jumbo jets. While moving, it creates bottom trawling - a physically tearing up the seafloor, devastating ecosystems and leaving barren deserts in its path.

More than 40% of the world's fishing catch is bycatch (non targeted animals being caught and killed) totalling 38 million tonnes per year. And today 90% of the ocean's top predators (sharks, bluefin tuna, swordfish, marlin, king mackerel) are gone (source).

Plastic pollution is impacting wildlife around the globe, the film states that only 0.03 per cent of plastic pollution waste comes from drinking straws, with the fishing nets and equipment actually constituting a significant amount of the plastic pollution in our oceans – including 46 per cent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean. It's something often ignored by many.

It seems that there is no such thing as sustainable fishing unless you go and catch the fish yourself or get it from a local fisherman. So reducing our fish consumption can lead to a smaller impact on this world, too.

If you want to learn more about this issue, you should definitely watch the documentary and also the Guardian commentary on this topic.