TED Talk: How I Fell in Love With a Fish

Fish, an enjoyable meal, has become harder and harder to get without impacting our environment. Farm-raised fish is a good option to help with the environmental impact. However they do pollute and are not very sustainable. The average food consumption ratio is 15:1. Which means it takes 15lbs of wild fish to give us 1lb of farmed tuna. That is not very sustainable. Dan Barber, a chef, thought he had found this great company for farming fish.  They farmed so far out in the ocean that the waste from the fish gets distributed instead of concentrated which equals less pollution. Their food ratio was only 2.5:1, for every 1lb of fish there was 2.5lbs of sustainable protein which consisted of algae, fish meals, and chicken pellets (feathers, skin, and bone marrow). 30% of their sustainable protein was the chicken pellets. Needless to say Dan soon fell out of love with that fish.

 Then in Spain he found this new glorious fish. The chef had really overcooked but surprisingly it still tasted really good. This chef was also a biologist who had gotten this fish from a fish farm in southern western corner of Spain. This farm was like no other, it was originally meant to raise beef in the swamp land. To do this they pushed they water out of the land, which caused major ecological impacts. Not long afterwards it was converted into a fish farm and they began to push water into the area and flooded the canals creating a 27,000 acre fish farm with various fish including bass, eel, and shrimp. This farm had such a rich system that the fish were eating the same thing as they would in the wild. It is a self-sustaining farm; there is actually an over-abundance of fish. There is enough fish to feed thousands of birds and still have plenty of fish leftover. Some of the birds fly 150,000 miles each way just to feed at the farm. . The fish farm is a natural purification plant. The water comes from the canal is then purified by the ecosystem itself and dumped out into the Atlantic ocean giving us slightly less pollution in the ocean.

My reaction to this is amazed. I am surprised how a somewhat simple idea of flooding the canals led to such an amazing ecosystem. Providing enough fish for the fish farm to also be a bird sanctuary, cleaning the water as it comes into the canals and then placing that clean water into the Atlantic Ocean, and enabling the fish to eat the same things it would in the wild leaving practically no environmental impact. I wish there were more farms like this in the world and fewer farms that feed chicken to the fish. Our meals would probably taste better and there would be definitely less of an environmental impact.  This fish farm became its own ecosystem with little help from people. I am impressed with the fish farm they were able to create.