Which fish to buy? ~ Technology Update

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Which fish to buy?

4:01 AM latest techno report No comments

The data that helps you to make ethical choices about which fish to eat

• Get the data

Which fish are ethically safe to eat? It's a simple question that you might ask but getting an answer quickly is not so easy.

There's lots of information on fish sustainability available on websites like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, FishWatch and the Marine Conservation Society, but it's complicated, and not something you can easily memorise. There are also guides you can print out, but this still involves carrying around a piece of paper.

Information like this has to be as quickly accessible and simplified as possible. This is not a question of laziness: People's lives are full of things to remember and worry about, and there are countless good causes to keep track of. So while you might carry around a guide while fish sustainability is at the forefront of your mind, eventually some other important thing will come along, and you will misplace the guide or just forget to use it. Half a year later you will find its crumpled remains in the pockets of your summer jacket.

And the advice has to be easy to apply. In some cases, a fish can be sustainable depending on the exact stock area it came from, or the exact method of fishing. But this level of information is not available in the supermarket or restaurant, nor would it be feasible to check it against a database each time you want to buy dinner.

For whichfish.org, I have compiled information from four main sources: the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Marine Conservation Society, FishWatch and the Greenpeace red list. Where there was serious contradiction, or the differences between sustainable and unsustainable sources of a fish were too involved, I have erred on the side of caution.

You can look at it on a smartphone, and in some cases download it for when you don't have reception. If you're standing in the supermarket or sitting in the restaurant, you can consult it to quickly figure out which fish to choose.

You can click on the entry for each fish and see more information, including a list of sources and a short explanation for the verdict of sustainable or unsustainable. With some fish labelled unsustainable there will be exceptions where you can source them sustainably from specific places. To highlight these sources and mention updates, I've started a twitter stream at @which_fish.

The raw data I've compiled is available as a spreadsheet and in a data format called JSON. I'd like to encourage other developers to create their own representations of the data. The files will remain at that location, and I will keep on updating the information.

Here is the latest data I'm using, in a spreadsheet for you to explore, please let me know what you think in the comments.