Coming to Your Table: Healthier Farmed Seafood

Posted: 10-Dec-2008; Updated: 20-Jul-2009

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One billion people worldwide depend on seafood for protein. View our pocket guide to healthy seafood and sushi choices.

Responding to a wave of consumer demand for healthy and sustainable seafood, leading natural foods retailer Whole Foods this year instituted strict new standards for farmed fish. Since roughly half the seafood consumed in the U.S. comes from fish farms, the standards could have a huge impact.

The new guidelines, developed with help from Environmental Defense Fund experts, ban the use of preservatives, antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals that can be harmful to humans yet are typically used to promote growth in fish. The policy also avoids fish farmed in wetlands and limits the use of wild fish as feed.

"These are the most comprehensive aquaculture standards to date for a retailer," says our seafood program manager Teresa Ish. "When a leading retailer like Whole Foods makes this kind of commitment, suppliers take notice."

Whole Foods seafood coordinator Carrie Brownstein credits EDF with requesting tough criteria. Earlier, we had partnered with Wegmans supermarkets to develop the first purchasing policy for farmed shrimp. Ninety percent of shrimp is imported, mostly from Southeast Asia and Latin America, where regulations often are lax and poorly enforced. Since Wegmans adopted stricter standards, its shrimp sales have accelerated.

We're now working with retailers to strengthen independent certification of seafood, and we've expanded our popular Seafood Selector, a shopping guide for consumers, to include sushi. The guide shows best and worst choices and highlights health risks from mercury and other contaminants.

"By choosing safe and sustainably farmed or caught fish," says Ish, "consumers can eat right and help guarantee that the bounty of our oceans is with us forever."