As two Midwesterners who moved to Puget Sound, we found out exactly how little we knew about seafood. After all, the fish we grew up on came out of lakes and streams.

Today fishing industries around the world - both finfish and shellfish - are continuing to harvest as many fish as possible, mostly without regard to the remaining fish stocks, the environmental effects of fish farms, or the careful labeling and identification of the product in restaurants and markets.

And to make matters worse, we are facing the introduction of genetically engineered fish into the American food system.

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; 

Mark Twain

Clearly we're being told fish tales - long fish tales! Trusting souls that we are (and given the fact that we have little connection to the sources of our food), there are people who believe:

1. Farmed fish are the same as wild fish.
2. Genetically engineered fish are better than wild fish.
3. The menu is always accurate: when it says wild salmon, it really is wild.

The issues surrounding production, processing, and marketing of our seafood are many and complex. Read the Fishy Fish Tales we're being told every day.

5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems, Daniel Pauly 

5 Easy Pieces features five contributions, originally published in Nature and Science, demonstrating the massive impacts of modern industrial fisheries on marine ecosystems. Initially published over an eight-year period, from 1995 to 2003, these articles illustrate a transition in scientific thought, from the initially-contested realization that the crisis of fisheries and their underlying ocean ecosystems was, in fact, global to its broad acceptance by mainstream scientific and public opinion.

In Four Fish, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus - salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna - and examining where each stands at this critical moment in time. He visits Norwegian mega farms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Trade certified fishing company in the world.  

He investigates the way PCBs and mercury find their way into seafood; discovers how Mediterranean sea bass went global; Challenges the author of Cod to taste the difference between a farmed and a wild cod; and almost sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific while searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna. Fish, Greenberg reveals, are the last truly wild food - for now. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.  

The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat, Charles Clover  

Just glance at the magazine shelves or the menu of your favorite restaurant and you will see that Americans are eating more fish than ever before, from sushi to ceveche to the classic tuna sandwich. Fish are healthy, fashionable, increasingly expensive, and consumed with a clearer conscience than meat.

But can this continue? As journalist Charles Clover shows in his global exploration of the destruction caused by overfishing, we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans in a single human lifetime greater than any yet caused by pollution. High-tech fishermen are trashing whole ecosystems, wrecking economies, and impoverishing the lives of people in poor countries - all to put fish on our plates.

There are more books on GoodFood World and more coming every week. Read, learn, and enjoy!

This week's video: Salmon Confidential

If you think watching a documentary about wild fish sounds boring, this film may well change your mind. It provides sobering insight into the inner workings of government agencies, and includes rare footage of the bureaucrats tasked with food and environmental safety.

It reveals how the very agency tasked with protecting wild salmon is actually working to protect the commercial aquaculture industry, to devastating effect.

Once you understand just how important wild salmon are to the entire ecosystem, you realize that what's going on here goes far beyond just protecting a fish species. Without these salmon, the entire ecosystem will eventually fail and, in case you've temporarily forgotten, you are part of this system.

There are more videos on GoodFood World and more coming every week.  

Ewe Lambs

Chicken Dinner, Sans the Chicken

I took a few steps to the living room doorway to tell the family to come and eat, turned back to the table, and the chicken was gone! Every crumb! The plate was there, undisturbed, but no chicken!