Assessing the inclusion of seafood in the sustainable diet literature

Abstract

The literature on sustainable diets is broad in its scope, and application yet is consistently supportive of a move away from animal‐based diets towards more plant‐based diets. The positioning of seafood within the sustainable diet literature is less clear. A literature review was conducted to examine how the environmental impacts of seafood consumption are assessed and what conclusions are being drawn about the inclusion of seafood in a sustainable diet. Seafood is an essential part of the global food system but is not adequately addressed in most of the sustainable diet literature. Aquaculture, the world's fastest growing food sector, was considered by very few papers. Seafood consumption was commonly presented as a dilemma due to the perceived trade‐offs between positive health outcomes from eating seafood and concerns of overfishing. A number of studies included seafood as part of their sustainable diet scenario, or as part of a diet that had lower impacts than current consumption. Most of the indicators used were biophysical, with a strong focus on greenhouse gas emissions, and very few studies addressed biological or ecological impacts. The assessment of seafood was limited in many studies due to relevant data sets not being incorporated into the models used. Where they were used, data sources and methodological choices were often not stated thereby limiting the transparency of many studies. Both farmed and wild‐capture production methods need to be integrated into research on the impacts of diets and future food scenarios to better understand and promote the benefits of sustainable diets.

Physicochemical and functional properties of protein isolate from sea cucumber ( Stichopus japonicus ) guts

“…Seafood, rich in protein, have caught more and more attention due to its delicious taste and nutritional value with the increasing of mariculture production (Farmery, Gardner, Jennings, Jennings, & Green, 2017;Pal & Suresh, 2016;Troell et al, 2014). The preparation, functional, and physicochemical properties of aquatic protein isolate are mostly concentrated on fish, such as herring Clupea harengus (Undeland, Kelleher, & Hultin, 2002), arrowtooth flounder Atheresthes stomias (Sathivel et al, 2004), sardine Sardina pilchardus (Santos, Pires, & Nelhas, 2007), cod Gadus Morhua (Brenner, Johannsson, & Nicolai, 2009), yellowfin tuna Thunnus albacares (Lee et al, 2016), silver carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix (Zhong et al, 2016), and bigeye snapper (Panpipat & Chaijan, 2017).…”

From Sea to Plate: The Role of Fish in a Sustainable Diet

“…Our failure to do so thus far has led to a disjointed understanding of our food system, contributed to inequalities in food access, and exacerbated overexploitation and environmental degradation. We argue here that fishery resources are of particular concern for sustainability yet often omitted in conceptions of our food system, and that such disjointed notions of food resources limit our ability to foster sustainable diets (Farmery et al, 2017).…”

Life cycle assessments of aquaculture systems: a critical review of reported findings with recommendations for policy and system development

“…Results of large‐scale studies can thus be used in the development of more sustainable diets in specific countries or regions, based on knowledge about the impacts of the actual seafood sold in that area (Farmery et al . ), or in advising policymakers regarding governmental plans for aquaculture sectorial development. For example, Henriksson et al .…”