Jewish vegetarians argue that Jews should eliminate,
or at least sharply reduce, their consumption of
animal products because the realities of animal-based
diets and agriculture are sharply inconsistent with
basic Jewish mandates to take care of our health,
treat animals with compassion, preserve the environment,
conserve resources, share with hungry people, and
seek and pursue peace.
However, many people who abstain from
eating mammals and birds continue to eat fish, sometimes arguing that
problems associated with the production and
consumption of other animal products do not apply to fish. After all, they
reason, fish are not raised under extremely cruel, confined conditions on
factory farms; unlike the raising of livestock, fishing does not cause the
erosion and depletion of soil, require the destruction of forests to
create pastureland and land to grow feed crops, and require huge amounts
of pesticides and irrigation water; also, fish is generally lower in fat
than other animal products, and is often erroneously considered a healthy
food.
Let us consider vegetarian arguments as they apply to
the "production" and consumption of fish:
1. Compassion for animals
Too often, we tend to class fish with plants rather than with animals.
Yet, unlike edible plants, fish are vertebrate animals with highly
developed nervous systems. Dr. Donald Bloom, professor of animal welfare
at Cambridge University, reminds us that "the scientific literature is
quite clear. Anatomically, physiologically, and biologically, the pain
system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals." Fishing is
not painless for fish by any means. When fish are hauled up from the deep,
the sudden change in pressure on their bodies causes painful decompression
which often leads their gills to collapse and their eyes to pop out. As
soon as fish are removed from the water, they begin to suffocate. Hooked
fish struggle because of physical pain and fear. As Dr. Tom Hopkins,
professor of marine science at the University of Alabama describes it,
getting hooked on a line is "like dentistry without novocain, drilling
into exposed areas."
Fish that are "farmed," as opposed to caught, do not have an easier
existence. Most trout, catfish, and many other species eaten in the
United States
are raised in modern "fish factories," where they are subject to the same
intensive, crowded conditions as land farm animals. Modern aquaculture
trends involve large-scale, highly mechanized fish production, much like
the chicken industry. Like crowded broiler chickens, fish are crammed in
enormous pools called "raceways," where they are pushed to gain weight far
faster than is natural. Experiments aim to find the greatest number of
fish that can be raised per cubic foot of water in order to maximize
profits.
Under these very crowded, unnatural conditions, fish suffer from stress,
infections, parasites, oxygen depletion, and gas bubble disease, akin to
"the bends" in human beings. To prevent the spread of diseases among the
fish, large amounts of antibiotics are used.
It's also worthwhile to point out that fish are not the only animals
to suffer because of people's appetite for their flesh. Egrets,
hawks, and other birds who eat fish are often shot or poisoned to
prevent them from eating fish at large open pools where fish are
raised. In one documented case, a California company with a U. S.
Fish and Wildlife permit to shoot
50 birds annually in the late 1980s was estimated to kill 10,000 to
15,000 birds, including many species not listed on the permit. Also many
non-target animals, including sea turtles, dolphins, sea birds, and other
fish, die horribly in commercial fishing nets.
2. Health
Fish is often considered a healthy food. However, while fish is
generally lower in fat than other animal products, it has no fiber and
virtually no complex carbohydrates or vitamin C, contains excessive
amounts
of protein and none none of the protective phytochemicals and antioxidants
found only in foods of plant origin. The average American consumes far
more
protein than required, and much less fiber than is necessary. The
overconsumption of protein, in particular, has been linked to several
health problems, including kidney stones and osteoporosis, while the lack
of
fiber may contribute to several diseases related to the digestive process,
such as diverticulosis and colon cancer. Also, not all fish are low in
fat;
salmon, for example, has 52 percent of its calories as fat.
Fish does possess the heart-protective omega-3 fatty acid, EPA
(eicosopentaenoic acic), but EPA is made by both fish and humans from the
essential omega-3 fatty acid, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), and that in turn
is made in the chloroplasts of green plants (e.g. algae, spinach). ALA can
be obtained from many plant foods, including green leafy vegetables,
flaxseed, canola, soybean, and walnut oils, tofu, pumpkin, and wheat germ
and these plant foods generally come without the nutritional hazards of
fish.
The greatest health hazard from eating fish, however, comes from the
depradations we humans have caused in their natural environment. Fish
and shellfish are repositories for the industrial and municipal
wastes and agricultural chemicals flushed into the world's waters.
Consider PCBs, a synthetic liquid once widely used for industrial
purposes. Recognized as carcinogenic in the late 1970's, their
production was barred in the UNited States, though their use in this
country in the United States and worldwide continues.
A six-month investigation by Consumers Union (publishers of Consumer
Reports magazine), concluded: "By far the biggest source of PCBs in
the human diet is fish.... As PCBs linger in the environment, their
composition changes, and they gradually become
more toxic...these more toxic forms are likely to be found in fish....
PCBs
accumulate in body tissue. The PCBs that you eat today will be with you
decades into the future." Consumers Union found PCBs in 43 percent of the
salmon, 25 percent of the swordfish, and 50 percent of the lake whitefish
they checked.
Other pollutants that concentrate in sea creatures include
pesticides; toxic metals including lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium,
and arsenic; dioxins; and radioactive substances such as strontium 90.
Because of biological magnification during movement up the food chain,
these
pollutants can reach levels as much as 9 million times that of the water
in
which the fish live, and they have been linked to many health problems,
including impaired behavioral development in young children. Nursing
infants
consume half of their mother's load of PCBs, dioxin, DDT, and other deadly
toxins.
Consumers Union's tests also showed that nearly half the fish tested
from
markets in New York City, Chicago, and Santa Cruz, CA, were contaminated
by
bacteria from human or animal feces. In addition, fish often are loaded
with
disease-causing worms and parasites. Many of the diseases fish harbor can
only be treated in humans with antibiotics. However, because of the way
fish
are raised - in crowded conditions on "aquatic" farms - fish factories
give
these same antibiotics to the fish to preserve their "crop." increasing
numbers of bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs, making the
treatment of some diseases more difficult in humans.
3. Environmental Impacts
If we aren't worried about the impact eating fish will have on our own
health, we should be concerned about the impact fishing has on the
earth's health. Modern commercial fishing use vast "factory"
trawlers the size of football fields, with huge nets sometimes miles
long that swallow up everything in their path. The result is that
thirteen of the world's seventeen major fisheries are depleted or in
serious decline, and the other four are considered "over exploited"
or "fully exploited."
The World Conservation Union lists over 1,000 fish worldwide as
endangered or threatened. Over 100 Pacific salmon communities are already
extinct and dozens more are seriously depleted. Researchers have found the
biodiversity of the oceans rivals that of the tropical rain forests, but
today we are effectively "clear cutting" these precious underwater
environments with our appetite for fish. Some waters that were once
teeming
with life are now so barren they have been compared to a "dust bowl."
Depleted fisheries have ripple effects throughout the entire marine
ecosystem. Major predator-prey situations have been changed.
For example, a decline in pollock in western Alaska has caused a 90
percent decline in Steller sea lions which caused the National Marine
Fisheries Service to give them the designation of "threatened" in
1990 and "endangered" in 1997. Loss of sea lions deprived killer
whales of their primary source of nutrition and they have shifted to
eating sea otters. As a result, sea otters have also declined by 90
percent since 1990, resulting in a surge by their prey, sea urchins.
The ecological principle that "everything is connected to everything
else" is dramatically illustrated here.
The environmental impact of aquatic farming is also cause for
concern. First, wild stocks are displaced as introduced fish invade
spawning grounds and compete for food. Interbreeding pollutes the
genetic pool. A study of forty extinct fish species by the National
Fisheries Research Centre in the U. S. indicated that species
introduced at aquatic farms helped wipe out 68 percent of the
indigenous species.
Second, fish farming depletes natural resources. Modern commercial
fishing is extremely energy intensive. It requires as much as twenty
calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy from
fish. Production of fish food is fifty to one hundred times as energy
intensive as production of plant food, even when the plant foods are
produced with modern technology.
Moreover, where fish are grown in artificial ponds, vast amounts of
water are required as the medium of growth, to replenish oxygen, and
to remove wastes from the aquatic system. Raising a ton of fish on an
aquatic farm requires 8 tons of water, almost the 8.5 tons of water
needed to raise a ton of grain-fed beef. At a time of increasing
droughts and demands for water to meet many essential needs, this is
very significant. This great need for water has caused further
environmental destruction too, as aquaculture is routinely conducted
on coastal land cleared of mangrove forests, the prime breeding and
spawning ground for many fish. To date, about half the world's
mangrove forests have been cleared, drained, or filled to make room
for fish farms.
4. Seeking and Pursuing Peace
The Jewish sages, commenting on the fact that the Hebrew words for
bread and war come from the same root, stated that shortages of grain
and other resources makes war more likely. The truth of their words
is illustrated by the increasing battles over increasingly scarce
fish in many areas. A United Nations official describes the situation
on the high seas as "the emerging anarchy in the oceans." With so
many vessels scouring increasingly fished-out waters, squabbles and
confrontations are expanding. Russians have attacked Japanese vessels
in the Northwest Pacific. Scottish fishers have attacked a Russian
trawler. A Falkland Islands' patrol chased a Taiwanese squid boat
more than 4,000 miles. Norwegian patrols cut the nets of three
Icelandic ships in the Arctic, and exchanged shots. The UN reported a
10 percent escalation in piracy and armed robberies directed toward
ships, many of them fishing vessels.
In summary, the "production" and consumption of fish is harmful to human health,
causes great suffering to the fish, threatens the
ocean's biodiversity, wastes resources, and makes
national conflicts more likely. Hence, an end to,
or at least a sharp decline in, the consumption
of fish and other animal products is a societal
imperative and arguably a Jewish imperative.
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