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- Hacker News
- The article reads as if nobody has considered farming anchovies, sardines, anchovetta, and other feed fish. We farm land crops for land herbivores. It seems we could feed some sea herbivores and omnivores with plants, and feed some of those to sea carnivores and omnivores.by cestith
- > My other advice is a one-size-fits-all food equation, which is, simply, to know where it came from. If you can't place it, trace it, or grow it/raise it/catch it yourself, don't eat it. Eat aware. Know your food. Don't wait on waiters or institutions to come up with ways to publicize it, meet your small fishmonger and chat him or her up at the farmer's market yourself.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-pescatores-dilemma_b_2463...
by righthand - Makes a lot of sense.
I always find it super weird that people will eat soy bean products over, say, meat or cream when they’ve never seen a soy bean plant in their whole lives.
by leobg - I recommend trying to eat more oysters and farmable shellfish.
They actually clean the water and have a positive impact on the ocean! Farming them is good!
by adverbly - But oysters are really not good. It tastes weird with too strong a note of salty water and has a pretty bad texture that makes masticating unenjoyable. They are poor man's food that got super expensive with clever marketing and supply management (and since they need to be alive the supply chain is extremely complicated and expensive, you can't store them for long).
If you live near a sea and can get them dirt cheap why not, but if you live far into the land, they are mostly a waste of good money and a way for pretentious people to appear fancy/rich at the Christmas holiday.
by seec - This just reminds me of Louisiana oyster farmers in the US fighting against coastal restoration[1]. Part of me is convinced they are happier having more of our state erode away which will create more oyster farm beds.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/louisiana-oyster-in...
by officeplant - Just eat the forage fish.
As much as I like salmon and the occasional flounder, my life would not be any worse if I had to stick to sprats (smoked sprats are delicious), sardines, anchovies and whatever else is a lower trophic level.
And you don't have to worry about mercury as a bonus.
by antisthenes - I've always wondered why we enjoy eating fish predators, but not animal predators...by isolli
- This is the website of a shrimp farm in the interior of Spain. Some years working now. They do not taste like wild but they are ok. https://norayseafood.es/en/by n3storm
- Are those Macrobrachium? The freshwater river prawn? I can't find anything on the site, but I doubt they're doing the world's largest saltwater aquarium...
- There are some exciting (or terrifying depending on your perspective) developments in the “lab grown/cultivated” space. I had a chance to have some WildType salmon the other day. The costs are still way above wild caught or farmed salmon, but if they can get the price down and improve the texture I could see these cultivated meats really taking off.
https://github.com/Michael-Nolan/Public/blob/main/Notes/2025...
by MichaelNolan - I'm curious what they use to provide food for the lab grown salmon cells. They need all the same nutrients but even more precisely formulated since there isn't a digestive system.
It seems like it will have the same problem with inputs or perhaps even worse. This is one of the reasons I'm still skeptical about lab grown meat taking off.
by why_at - Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy are against farming any kind of sea food and taking away krill or seaweed from oceans. Oceans are already devastated by overfishingby iberator
- Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy like to say what we shouldn't do, but they're usually overidealistic, and hardly ever suggest what we should do instead. Not eating seafood is just not a realistic expectation.
- There is a certification group called Best Aquaculture Practices[0] that sets standards for hatcheries, farms, feed mills, and processing plants regarding sustainability and quality. They've got a new feed mill standard[1] but it seems like it gives feed mills a few years to come into compliance to use sustainable fishmeal and fish oil.
[0]https://bapcertification.org/Home [1]https://bapcertification.org/Downloadables/pdf/standards/BAP...
by goda90 - Ah, fish - the one farmed animal we have not figured out how to feed with soybean yet. Soon, I guess.
I'm not quite sure "fish-free fed fish” is going to have the same cache as “grass-fed beef," despite the article's suggestion.
by CGMthrowaway - I've been taking algae supplements lately. It tastes like fish food because it is fish food.
Apparently, it was a source of cheap protein during wars, but didn't provide enough nutrients and tastes like pond scum. It ended up in the supplement sector because it was easier to get approved as it over food. Soylent Green was inspired by it.
I hope it does go back into the fish food sector - it's cheap and nutritious but tastes worse than soy.
by muzani - This feels very close to Silicon Valley's bit about pescepescetarianism.by willis936
- ? soy is a major ingredient in farm-fish food
- > Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish.
If something like this works, it has the double benefit of pulling carbon from the air/water and turning all of the matter into food. With typical plants we grow on land, (generally) most of the plant isn't consumed so whatever carbon it stored is a waste product. In some countries, that waste is just burned and sent back into the atmosphere. But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
by forgotoldacc - Consumable by who? Just being not poisonous is not enough to be called consumable (taste, texture, price, availability, digestibility etc).by iberator
- Nope, it does not pull any carbon dioxide from air/water.
The oil with omega-3 acids is not produced from any algae, but from cultures of special strains of Schizochytrium.
Schizochytrium is a fungus-like organism (not related to true fungi). It is called "algae" in marketing language, because "Schizochytrium" or "Stramenopiles" are words unknown to the general population and because "algae" sounds more appealing to the rich vegans who have afforded to pay the high prices under which this oil has been sold for many years.
In any case, this does not matter much. Long-chain omega-3 are an essential fish food ingredient, but by mass they are a small fraction of fish food. Much more can be gained regarding carbon dioxide by using for the fish food a mixture of vegetable proteins that have been preprocessed to enable their digestion by fish.
Schyzochytrium has enabled the production of long-chain omega-3 acids without capturing small fish or krill for a few decades, but in the past the cost of Schyzochytrium oil was too high.
In order to be used as an ingredient in farmed fish food the cost of Schizochytrium oil had to be decreased a lot.
It appears that at least Veramaris has succeeded to do this, but unfortunately such progresses have not become visible yet in the retail price of Schizochytrium oil for human consumption.
A decade ago, Schizochytrium oil was 8 to 10 times more expensive than fish oil. Then its price has decreased, so that 4 or 5 years ago it already was only 3 times more expensive than fish oil.
Unfortunately, after that there were no further price reductions, so today the retail price of Schizochytrium oil is about the same as 5 years ago.
If the production cost of Schizochytrium oil has really diminished, as said in the parent article (because it cannot be used in fish food, unless it is cheaper than fish oil), then the producers have now increased profits, without decreasing the retail price. Of course, like always, it is not certain that this is really the winning strategy for them, because there may be many others like me, who wait for a reduction in the price of Schizochytrium oil in order to switch to it from fish oil, so keeping this inflated price may result in a much lower sales volume than with a smaller price.
Moreover, for whoever wants to consume vegan oil with long-chain omega-3 acids, there is an additional trap with Schizochytrium oil. The original Schizochytrium oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil (i.e. around 2 grams of omega-3 acids per 5 mL of oil), but there are many sellers who sell diluted oil at the same price like the sellers who sell non-diluted oil. Thus the true price of long-chain omega-3 acids from the sellers of diluted oil may be 10 to 20 times higher than from fish oil. Therefore when buying omega-3 capsules or bottled Schizochytrium oil one must read carefully the fine print and compute the price per gram of DHA+EPA, in order to be sure that the price is right.
by adrian_b - If eating food sequestered carbon, then Earth would have turned into an ice ball millions (billions?) of years ago.by gizmo686
- > But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
I'm not sure it helps at all regarding co2, you'll shit it and breath it out in a matter of days... co2 is only a problem when you burn fossil fuels, because you reintroduce millions years of deposit back in the atmosphere in a very short period of time. That's why things like burning wood aren't a big deal other than localised pollution
by lm28469 - The need for wild-caught protein to feed fish is so strong that there is krill piracy around antarctica!
https://apnews.com/article/whales-antarctica-krill-global-wa...
- I thought there were fairly large blackfly farming operations for fish feeding. maybe for non-ocean species? As with a lot of operational farming practices- it's probably a lot more complex than a few articles could easily encompass.by dv_dt
- The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.
by piltdownman - You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.by reenorap