Over 70% of the seafood we eat in Australia is imported. So now we know that it isn’t just the mercury in the big fish that’s a problem, it’s also the amount and type of fish we are eating, plus the amount of bi-catch (see earlier post), the dishonest methods being used to fish such as using GPS to locate schools of fish, sea bed trawling, the sometimes toxic conditions and feed of farmed sea cages and the ever present risk that some will escape into the wild contaminating the wild fish, but now we also have the issue of BPA cans.
In Australia we now have mandatory labelling laws on fresh fish, which means all fresh seafood needs to have its place of origin displayed. Currently the law is not the same for cooked fish, so anything you get from a fish ’n chip shop, restaurant, café, in a box in a supermarket or pub doesn’t require it to be labelled. Hopefully change is not far away though.
As it stands, this type of seafood including prawn cutlets, crumbed and battered fish, fish fingers, crab cakes, seafood sticks (usually not seafood at all actually) you’re getting is more than likely coming from a toxic farm in Thailand or South America.
Buy local fish that has been given the green light, or at least a yellow light from the @AusMarConsSoc Greenpeace International or GoodFishBadFish.
