Tuna And Mercury: What's Best For You Is Best For The Planet

Polar bears are cute, cuddly, and everyone is sad that they might run out of ice and become extinct like the pathetic animated bear in An Inconvenient Truth. Tuna are neither cute nor cuddly, and no one is winning a Nobel Prize for a touching movie about their imminent demise. For the average American, though, the status of the tuna fishery has bigger implications for daily life than the status of the polar bear.

Basically, it'd be great if we all stopped eating tuna, for both of the reasons you mention: due to being high on the food chain, they often contain high levels of mercury (a byproduct of industry, particularly coal-fired power plants); and many species are overfished. Longlines, the sixty-foot-long baited lines used to catch many kinds of tuna, have a high bycatch. Purse seining for Pacific yellowfin tuna was responsible for all those dead dolphins, but this has apparently been improved.

No official agency is going to recommend that we stop eating tuna because a) the tuna people would be annoyed; b) when has the government ever told us to stop doing anything bad (have you seen cigarette labels in Europe?); and c) eating fish is still kind of good for you. And we love our tuna: Americans ate about 2.7 pounds of canned tuna per person in 2007.

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