THE SET-UP: Did you know that the average supermarket seafood department loses “more than $83,000 a year because of product waste?”
Then again, why would anybody know that? Unless, of course, they happen to work in a supermarket or, like me, they read Supermarket News. Yeah, I read SN because I am weird like that … and it usually has interesting tidbits like this comparison of the differences between farmed and wild-caught fish:
Fresh wild fish and live shellfish are the biggest shrink items in seafood departments, he said. While operators usually kill and process farmed fish under refrigeration in sanitary facilities with quick shipments to destinations, wild fish harvesting often occurs in warmer water and workers typically store selections in ambient temperatures on fishing vessels that are less sanitary than a HACCP certified processing plant.
That disparity translates into losses because wild-caught fish has a shorter shelf life:
It frequently takes up to a week before operators offload fresh wild fish to plants…which, for instance, can result in wild-caught fish fillets having only two to four days of shelf life in stores. In contrast, farmed salmon can have a five-to-seven-day shelf life, and even longer if retailers sell the products in skin-tight 10K OTR packaging….
The “skin-tight 10K OTR packaging” refers to the ubiquitous, shrink-wrapped plastic you find enveloping frozen fish filets … and, btw, “HACCP” is the FDA’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) management system for food safety from “from raw material production” through to “distribution and consumption of the finished product.”
Obviously, your local supermarket is carrying farmed fish because it can sit on that bed of ice far longer than the wild stuff. But there are problems with the farmed fish, too. Whether it’s disease or nutrition or the odorous soup they “swim” in during their crowded lives … aquaculture is not without environmental impact.
On the flipside, it also looks grim for wild-caught fish … from the wholesale destruction (and bycatch) some trawlers leave in their wake, to the unavoidable fact that “90% of global fisheries are already fished to their maximum sustainable levels.”
We are poisoning the oceans with our plastic trash and pulling out its fish at an industrial scale. Basically, we are defecating where we eat and we’re eating more and more of less and less. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Americans picked as their president the living embodiment of defiance in the face of responsibility … particularly in the face of mounting evidence that our unchecked appetites are fueling spectacular disasters and numerous ecological crises. Maybe Trump is just millions of us collectively sticking our fingers in our ears and loudly singing “La-La-La-La-La-La?” - jp
TITLE: A family oyster farm is caught in a bitter fight over Maine’s waters
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/03/10/midcoast/midcoast-business/a-family-oyster-farm-is-caught-in-a-bitter-fight-over-maines-waters-joam40zk0w/
EXCERPTS: Business grew quickly after Dan Devereaux and Doug Niven started their oyster farm in Brunswick a decade ago.
They sold 10,000 oysters in their first season. Three years later, they were growing 25,000 a year to sell at the local farmers market, with so much demand they aimed to grow them by the millions in the coming years.
Today, Mere Point Oyster Co. employs 10 people year-round and 10 more in the summer, shipping its products to high-end, award-winning restaurants.
The farm has become a shining example of what Maine’s aquaculture industry says it can do for the state. With approval from state regulators, the family-run business has expanded and provided new economic opportunities, demonstrating what it says is a responsible alternative way to sustainably raise food on Maine’s coast.
But the operation has been controversial almost from the start, taking fire from neighboring landowners and wild seafood harvesters who have expressed concern about its impact on the environment and the ability of vessels to navigate through its growing areas, as well as what they characterize as the industrialization of the ocean.
In the years since, a group called Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage has formed out of that opposition and broadened its fight against what it calls industrial aquaculture, working with towns all along Maine’s coast to restrict it. It has also ramped up its push back against Mere Point, going to court late last year to challenge a temporary dock that the company hopes to build.
While there had been earlier disputes over aquaculture in Maine — which can include the organized growing of oysters, mussels, scallops, seaweed and fish — the expansion of Mere Point in Brunswick helped to push the debate to another level.
When Dan Devereaux and Niven applied for a 10-year, 40-acre lease in 2018 to expand their operation in Maquoit Bay, off of the eponymous Mere Point, they wanted to meet increasing demand, they told the Bangor Daily News at the time.
They also saw aquaculture as a reliable alternative to Maine’s traditional fisheries under changing conditions.
Neighbors of the project saw things differently, hiring an attorney to oppose the application and eventually organizing as a group called Save Maquoit Bay. They were worried about the size and environmental impacts of the project, as well as its effects on coastal navigation and fishing conditions for wild harvesters. They also questioned the idea of the water being privatized and transferred to another owner.
Now, some of the people in the fight against Mere Point’s early growth are involved with Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage. The group is active at the local level, providing towns with model ordinances for limiting state-issued aquaculture leases and promising to pay legal fees associated with them — despite the state insisting that only it has the authority to regulate aquaculture in coastal waters.
The foundation has also kept up pressure on Mere Point. In December, it and unnamed “concerned neighbors” filed a complaint against Brunswick in Cumberland County Superior Court, appealing the town’s approval of Mere Point’s application for a temporary dock. The foundation first appealed the project to the local zoning appeals board and lost.
In response to emailed questions, the foundation’s director and spokesperson, Crystal Canney, said that this is a routine appeal of a permitting decision. She argued that it’s “completely separate” from the group’s work with towns on aquaculture limits and that it’s unfair to call it a legal action against Brunswick.
Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, said he didn’t take Canney’s group seriously at first. But now that several towns have approved ordinances pitched by the foundation, the association spends significant time and money countering it.
In discussing the debate about aquaculture, both industry advocates and Canney also raised questions about which groups are funding the other side.
Belle argued that the opposition is driven by wealthy summer residents who want to preserve the views from their homes.
Canney noted that the Maine Aquaculture Association receives support from Cooke Aquaculture, a controversial Canadian company that raises salmon in pens off Washington County and was recently sued over alleged Clean Water Act violations. The company denies the claims. Belle said Cooke is a dues-paying member of the association.
Derek Devereaux said Maine’s aquaculture operations are smaller and more locally owned than those on the West Coast. He noted that he too would be concerned about out-of-state fish farms running huge factories in Maine.
TITLE: RSPCA suspends Huon Aquaculture certification over 'inhumane' fish handling
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-08/rspca-suspends-huon-aquaculture-certification-salmon-video/105026866
EXCERPTS: The RSPCA has suspended its certification of Huon Aquaculture products after the release of video footage that showed live fish being dumped in tubs with dead fish.
Huon — owned by Brazilian multinational meat processor JBS — was the only one out of three farmed salmon companies operating in Tasmanian waters to have RSPCA certification.
It allowed Huon products to have "RSPCA approved farming" on its labels, to demonstrate that salmon were raised in a "well-managed environment" and handled "in a low-stress manner".
In recent weeks, the salmon industry in south-east Tasmania has been grappling with elevated fish mortalities from a disease outbreak of rickettsia-like organisms. More than 5,500 tonnes of dead fish have been dumped at waste facilities.
The drone video, captured by the Bob Brown Foundation (BBF), showed live and dead salmon at a Huon site near the entrance to the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, south of Hobart, being siphoned into tubs and sealed.
In a statement, RSPCA Australia said the certification would be suspended for 14 days while further inquiries were undertaken.
"The inhumane handling of live, sick or injured fish as shown in the video being circulated is completely unacceptable," the statement reads.
"As the public response to this incident shows, animal welfare in farming is incredibly important to Australians, and this is no different when it comes to aquaculture.
"Fish are sentient animals capable of pain and suffering, which is why the RSPCA Approved Standard exists in the first place."
Huon was in breach of two parts of the RSPCA standards — one which required responsible handling of fish including for their euthanasia, and which stated "fish must not be left to die in the air".
When contacted about the video on Wednesday evening, Huon stated it would undertake its own investigation.
The video was the latest in a range of vision released by the BBF since the start of mass die-offs last month.
Others have shown piles of dead fish clustered at the edge of pens and fish being dumped in landfill, while salmon chunks and fatty globules have been washing up on several Tasmanian beaches.
NRE Tasmania released a further statement on Saturday, describing it as an "unprecedented seasonal 'spike' mortality event".
The department stated that the marine bacterium causing the mass die-offs — Piscirickettsia salmonis — was endemic to eastern and south-eastern Tasmanian waters and "specifically only impacts salmonids".
BBF called on the RSPCA to permanently end its certification of Huon products.
BBF marine campaigner Alistair Allan — who is also a Greens candidate for the federal seat of Lyons — said the pens were "overstocked".
"Farmed salmon are crammed together and left to suffer as they all get sick and start to die," he said.
TITLE: Co-op is the latest UK supermarket to end prawn eyestalk ablation
https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/aquaculture/co-op-is-the-latest-uk-supermarket-to-end-prawn-eyestalk-ablation
EXCERPTS: United Kingdom-based cooperative supermarket Co-op has ended the use of eyestalk ablation in its farmed prawns and committed to adopting electrical stunning as a humane harvesting method by the end of 2027. This makes Co-op the latest U.K. retail chain to commit to ending practices that many view as inhumane after pressure from animal rights groups.
The two practices that have come under the most fire from activists are eyestalk ablation and ice slurry slaughter. Eyestalk ablation involves cutting the eyes off female prawns to provoke egg production. In recent years, researchers have demonstrated that this process may not be necessary, or even beneficial, for egg production.
The other practice is ice slurry slaughter, which slowly suffocates prawns in ice water during harvesting. Co-op will transition to using a more humane practice, which electrically stuns prawns before slaughter, rendering them unconscious and unable to feel pain.
Co-op has been working to eliminate eyestalk ablation from its supply chain since 2022, when 72 percent of their female prawns were non-ablated. By 2023, that number had reached 82 percent; now, the company says its supply chain is 100 percent free from eyestalk ablation. The supermarket chain recently introduced new welfare standards that ban the use of ice slurry slaughter, and which laid out a plan for adopting electrical stunning throughout its supplier farms.
Prawns were recognized as sentient by the U.K. government in 2021, after research suggested that the animals are capable of feeling pain and distress.
The International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW), one of the groups pushing to end the controversial practices, celebrated Co-op’s announcement, with the organization’s Head of Invertibrate Welfare Policy, Jonas Becker, saying “this is an important commitment that could set new standards in the industry.”
BTW: While we’re on the topic of “new standards in the industry”… SeaD Consulting, which Courthouse News describes as “a Houston-based company dedicated to rooting out seafood fraud” is “pioneering this new type of rapid genetic test, which specializes in identifying shrimp species.”
And why does that matter?
Because their test “has helped bring light to what shrimp-watchers say is a major problem: Fraud and mislabeling in the domestic shrimp supply.”
They first used their rapid-responding test to uncover the widespread misrepresentation of farm-raised shrimp as “locally-caught” at the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. First of all, you gotta admire the festival’s truth in advertising—as the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrated, petroleum and shrimp do mix. Secondly, SeaD found that four of five festival samples showed “genetic markers of imported farm-raised shrimp.” They replicated that result at the National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Then they went on a road trip:
Testing restaurants across the Gulf and South Atlantic regions, the company says it found a fraud rate of around 79% percent across Florida, Mississippi and Texas. (Louisiana has a much lower rate at 23%, which SeaD says may be due to stricter regulations.) Taken together, they say that amounts to more than a $1 billion loss for the domestic shrimp industry.
The problem was big enough to attract the attention of the Biden Administration:
In October, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Alvaro Bedoya sent a warning letter to the country’s 10 highest-grossing seafood restaurants. He said he would “not hesitate to request a law enforcement investigation” if there was evidence of seafood fraud. The agency has demanded that restaurants “tell the truth and play by the rules.”
And they weren’t playing around:
In November, the Justice Department imposed a $1.5 million penalty against a well-known seafood restaurant in Biloxi, Mississippi for misrepresenting imported fish as local. The restaurant’s owner was also criminally sentenced.
Sadly, mislabeling is the least of the problems with imported shrimp. Just go to the Google machine (or DuckDuckGo, if you prefer) and type-in “shrimp abuse Asia” … or you can revisit two TRIFECTAs from 2024:
DAILY TRIFECTA: Who's Paying The Price For Cheap Shrimp? [SEP 30, 2024]
DAILY TRIFECTA: The Pain And Abuse Behind Your Shrimp Cocktail [MAR 21, 2024]
Here’s the spoiler alert … it ain’t pretty. - jp