The NY Times ran a follow up about their investigation that found abnormally high levels of mercury in fish served at area restaurants. Toxicology reports from 44 pieces of sushi, ordered from places including Nobu Next Door and Sushi Seki, may in fact contribute to some New Yorkers’ 3 times higher-than-average blood levels of mercury. It turns out, however, that most New Yorkers just don’t care.
The mercury issue, while especially serious for pregnant women and children, is just one component in the overfishing debate often used as a smokescreen for larger issues. For instance, the Times drew an immediate response from The Center for Consumer Freedom, a Phillip Morris-connected P.R. group that, among other things, has been aggressively lobbying against the city's move to require fast food restaurants to prominently display their calorie information.
Mercury level arguments belie the complexity of overfishing issues, specifically destructive purse seines and long-line fishing techniques that create a huge amount of by-catch when it comes to the canned tuna industry. It turns out that bluefin, the more prized (read: expensive) variety of tuna used at sushi restaurants, is just plain overfished. An excellent introduction to all of this is Charles Clover’s The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat.
American Tuna at
But back to mercury: American Tuna, a company that sells canned albacore tuna, contains lesser amounts of the metal than most canned kinds. The reason for this has to do with the smaller size of the fish caught (older, larger fish accumulate more mercury), temperature of the water they are caught in (older fish stick to warmer waters), and the method American Tuna uses to catch them (the “pole and line†method).
Source: Written by Hugh Merwin, The Gothamist, NY
