Don Kent, President of the Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute, was standing in the seafood aisle of a Whole Foods in the affluent San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla recently when he took out his phone and snapped a photo of a fresh-looking branzino.
“Branzino is European sea bass,” Kent explained. “It’s grown in the Mediterranean. And it’s flown 6,900 miles from Greece to here and then it’s put on ice in La Jolla.”
Kent, whose organization studies the intersection of nature and human activity and offers solutions on how the two can co-exist, is one of the people who believes there’s a different way to approach how we get our protein here in the United States. He insists that there’s a new, innovative, and more efficient method of feeding people — not just in La Jolla, but all over the world. Aquaculture. Or, as it’s known to most people, fish farming.
“We spend 130 million dollars a year on air freight for the 300,000 metric tons of salmon that get flown into the U.S. from Chile. Think of the carbon footprint associated with that,” he says. “There’s absolutely no reason why that brazino shouldn’t be a white sea bass grown three miles off the coast. And then imagine the carbon footprint that’s saved in doing that.”
What, exactly, is aquaculture? The basic idea is that you’re farming aquatic life. The specifics, however, vary quite a bit. In the case of fish, eggs are fostered into small fish at a hatchery, raised for food, and farmed whenever they’re needed. The fish can be raised in tanks or in net pens, in fresh water, off the coast, or out in the open ocean. And fish are just one kind of aquaculture; a similar process is utilized to farm shellfish — like mussels or oysters — and for seaweeds…
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