Tuna surprise: Eating canned fish is one of the best ways you can fight climate change

If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the days when canned tuna was a regular purchase at the grocery store—and made regular appearances on the dinner table, in dishes like tuna casserole, tuna salad and tuna-stuffed tomatoes.

Those days are gone. Consumption of canned tuna has dropped by almost half over the past three decades.

There are various explanations for the decline. The tuna industry blames millennials. “A lot of millennials don’t even own can openers,” Andy Mecs, VP of marketing and innovation for StarKist, told the Wall Street Journal, adding canned tuna to the long list of foods millennials have killed, from raisins to mayonnaise to American cheese.

A climate ripe for canned fish

Now, though, canned tuna is rising again, along with other canned fish, like anchovies and sardines. The reason is climate change. Canned fish is the lowest-carbon animal protein there is. It doesn’t need energy for refrigeration, doesn’t go bad and is very sustainable compared to other sources of animal protein.

The food we produce and the way we do it is a major contributor to climate warming. It must be grown, processed and shipped to market, and all of these put carbon into the atmosphere. Around one-third of the greenhouse gases that humans emit are connected to our food and the biggest contributor of carbon emissions is meat production.

If you’re concerned about climate change and want to modify your eating habits to help the climate, there are various steps you can take. You can go vegetarian or vegan. If you want to keep eating meat—or a reasonable facsimile—you can buy plant-based “meat.”

Or you can push your cart over to the canned foods aisle and toss in some tinned fish. Wild fish provides you the most protein with the least carbon emissions. And when it’s canned, it’s even better, because it needs no refrigeration and never ends up as food waste because it never spoils.

Wild fish don’t need feed, which is a large source of emissions in the livestock industry. Fish also don’t need any of the energy inputs that cows, pigs and chickens do. Further, fish don’t belch methane. In total, the catching of wild fish produces only 4% of emissions from global food production and the catching of those fish that go into cans produces a scant 2%.

The sustainability question

Of course, if we’re going to rely on fish as a way to address climate change, we must ensure that wild fish populations are not exhausted by overfishing. Currently, just 16% of wild fisheries are certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council.

And then there’s the fact that wild fish are very sensitive to climate change and warming oceans. Which means that, if we want to enjoy wild fish in the future—canned or fresh—we need to take climate action whenever and wherever we can.

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To save our climate, we must change. Not only how we eat but how we shop, how we get around, how we live our lives. Always, we must make choices that work for our planet, not against it.

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