With a sizzle of grease, a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish slides across the sticky drive-through counter in Homer, Alaska. Before being battered and fried, the fish in this sandwich was likely caught along the state’s rugged western coast, in the rapidly warming Bering Sea.
You’ve probably eaten Alaskan pollock, even if you didn’t know it — it’s in fish sticks in school lunches and freezer aisles, sold at Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, and White Castle, mixed into fish-oil supplements, imitation crab meats, and faux salmon dips. Over 2.7 billion pounds of the mottled silver fish are caught annually in one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, representing a market of almost two billion dollars.
While pollock is often held up as a prime example of sustainably sourced seafood — industry groups claim it is “one of the most climate-friendly proteins in the world” — the reality is far more murky.
To get all this fish from the Bering Sea, which provides more than 40 percent of all seafood caught in the United States, factory trawlers drag huge nets that sweep up catches by the ton. Their gear regularly scrapes the bottom of the seafloor for miles at a time, destroying vital, slow-growing habitats. Trawling boats — those that catch species living on the bottom, and those that target pollock — often snag species they don’t intend to, what’s known as bycatch. Regulators reported this included ten orca whales in the Bering Sea last year.
Trawlers’ bycatch also includes failing fisheries like Chinook salmon — whose population has declined so much that residents on the Yukon River who rely on them are prohibited from catching any for the next seven years. Critics warn that years of disrupting marine habitat…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Lois Parshley
