What may be true in online dating turns out not to be the case in real life: There may not, in fact, always be more fish in the sea.
A new report finds that as global fish populations crash, governments around the world are dumping ever-more lavish subsidies on the fishing industry, spelling an ocean of trouble for the three-quarters of our planet covered in water. The result: Our extermination campaign that’s emptying the seas is only accelerating.
With 90% of fish populations fully exploited and no sign of our appetite for fish decreasing, the question of what, if anything, we can realistically do to save our seas is pressing. If governments are largely making the problem worse by increasing subsidies, is there a role for the private sector to stem the tide?
That’s in fact what many deep-pocketed investors are betting on right now. Impossible and Beyond burgers may be generating all the headlines at the moment, but companies making seafood alternatives are officially big business.
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Meat giant Tyson Foods just invested in New Wave Foods, a startup making plant-based shrimp for everyone from kosher Jews to those who just want to enjoy juicy shrimp without jumbo guilt. Aramark is now serving Ocean Hugger Foods’ tomato-based “tuna” in its cafeterias. And Chipotle recently bet on Sophie’s Kitchen, a small company making all manner of animal-free seafood products.
Some companies, however, aren’t content to make fish-free seafood out of plants. Rather, another category of start-ups is reeling in major funding by making real fish meat while leaving the animals to swim free.
Two thousand year ago, Jesus is said to have multiplied just a couple fish into enough to feed 5,000 human mouths. Today, companies like San Diego’s BlueNalu are doing pretty much the same thing: taking miniscule biopsies of whole fish and multiplying them to grow actual fish meat without having to kill fish. Their most recent haul: A $20 million Series A round. A similarly promising “clean fish” start-up, Wild Type, just attracted $12.5 million after offering a public tasting of its salmon that was grown from salmon cells as opposed to salmon slaughter.
If such start-ups are able to scale up and produce products that actually satisfy seafood-lovers at an affordable cost, alt-fish may not be that alt for long. In the same way that plant-based milks have taken the dairy aisle by storm, making seafood with a tiny fraction of the resources needed to catch or farm actual fish could become far more normal in the years to come.
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None of this is to let governments off the hook, of course. Offering ever-growing subsidies to extractive industries preying on ever-dwindling stocks of wildlife is as poor of an idea as it sounds. If anything, governments ought to be declaring marine safe zones like Barack Obama did at the end of his presidency rather than incentivizing more fishing. But if governments really want to do something to help save our seas, in addition to ending such perverse subsidies, offering R&D assistance to startups seeking to produce truly sustainable seafood — whether from plants or cells — would be a good place to start.
After all, many governments are already funding research to invent new clean energy technologies. Why not clean meat at the same time?
The fact that there are always more fish in the dating sea is good for single people. But without new technologies to help us produce more with less, an ever-growing humanity isn’t that good for the actual fish in the sea. Perhaps alt-fish start-ups will be part of the solution that helps us lighten the burden we’re placing on the nonhuman world.
Now that would be a good catch.
Shapiro is the author of “Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World” and the CEO of The Better Meat Co.
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November 01, 2019 at 05:47AM
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Commentary: Is fish-free seafood next wave of change? - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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