NY Times editorial: less meat-based eating as solution to net protein loss prob

[Guest guest]

November 10, 2008

EDITORIAL

The Protein Pyramid

Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-

century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double

again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat

eat before it becomes meat?

Increasingly the answer is very small fish harvested from the ocean

and ground into meal and pressed into oil. According to a new report

by scientists from the University of British Columbia and financed

by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, 37 percent by weight of all

the fish taken from the ocean is forage fish: small fish like

sardines and menhaden. Nearly half of that is fed to farmed fish;

most of the rest is fed to pigs and poultry.

The problem is that forage fish are the feedstock of marine mammals

and birds and larger species of fish. In other words, farmed fish,

pigs and poultry — and the humans who eat them — are competing for

food directly with aquatic species that depend on those forage fish

for their existence. It's as if humans were swimming in schools in

the ocean out-eating every other species.

The case is worse than that. When it comes to farmed fish, there is

a net protein loss: it takes three pounds of fish feed to produce

one pound of farmed salmon. This protein pyramid — small fish fed to

farmed fish, pigs and poultry that are then fed to humans — is

unsustainable. It threatens the foundation of oceanic life.

The report's authors suggest that it would be better if humans ate

these small fish, as many cultures once did, instead of using them

as feed. That is one way of addressing the problem of net protein

loss. The real answers are support for sustainable agriculture in

the developing world and encouraging healthy, less meat-based eating

habits as a true sign of affluence everywhere.