Flutter wrote:Don't they need to provide the ingredients on the bag by law? Around here fake crab is actually pollock which is a really cheap kind of fish.
pollock
is currently a "really cheap kind of fish", but only because we've not yet been confronted directly with the wide impacts of catching and eating it at the local grocery seafood counter...
this is a "PSA" type response, not a preachy one (at least that's my intention, please forgive if it comes off the latter). seafood is my number one thing i love to eat, so it pains me to think about any of this when i buy seafoods for me or my pets, but check it out:
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campai ... /red-fish/
a similar list can be found in many places with a quick google, here's more info:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx. this is general scientific consensus about world fishstocks, not any "enviro over-reaction" if anyone reading this (in general) is concerned about such "political" stuff.
as far as pollock (which i've eaten with abandon as fish tacos in alaska, at the end of an outward bound course no less..., and still do eat):
"Bycatch in the pollock fishery is huge given the scale of the fishery. Crab, salmon, and groundfish species are routinely caught as bycatch. In 2007, 130,000 chinook salmon were caught as bycatch in the pollock fishery, setting a bycatch record that alarmed fishing dependent communities, environmentalists, and fishery managers.
Pollock overfishing has an adverse effect on Alaska native communities throughout the southern half of the Bering Sea and the Aleutians, as well as the Gulf of Alaska. Localized depletion is forcing local fishermen to travel farther and farther offshore in search of fish that were once plentiful right off the beach, and in the process to face increasing risks for diminishing returns. The fishery also has a negative impact on native communities in Canada. In 2007, DNA sampling of chinook salmon bycatch in the pollock fishery revealed that more than 26,000 fish were of Yukon river origin. As a result of the huge bycatch in 2007, some First Nation subsistence communities upriver in the Canadian Yukon were not allowed to catch their full chinook sustenance quota that year."
and i know those stats have not improved in more recent years:
http://www.thesalmonpeople.com/index.html
-as people who love to keep wet-pets in our homes, especially as most pet puffers are still wild caught, we need to learn all of this stuff, disheartening as it may be.....
if you look at the "fish watch lists" remember all of the places in US culture where we are offered fried shrimp, hoki/pollack/cod other "whitefish" fast-food patties, etc. for really, really cheap. as general consumers we are never ever given cause to think we're buying a threatened species "filet-o-fish" or "more than 10-times-it's-weight dead bycatch" "shrimp feast"..... people
literally do not know, and you can't care if you don't even know.
i was most shocked that the atlantic scallop fishery kills significant numbers of loggerhead sea turtles. literally i never thought of that connection before.....
so anyway, we all need more prominent, everyday education about the global status of our world ocean and the fish we (and our pets) eat. this is something we should ask our governments -wherever we live- to make real on a local educational level.
if you don't know the facts you cannot "choose wisely".
-laura
, but i doubt the actual presence of the land-plant and seaweed-derived additives, or even the egg stuff, is in the end way different than feeding ghost shrimp loaded full of processed hikari algae wafers, just as an example..... if it's just a wee bit of his diet i think he'll be fine.
) and about 50% were illegally mislabeled by North American government standards. Personally I don't even eat food with a bit of seafood in it. Yuck!