The FDA is encouraging pregnant women to consume more seafood for their own personal health and the developmental health of their unborn children.

Attention Pregnant women:  Sea Port’s Go Blue! Plate Choose My Seafood for Sustainability® is here to help and guide you in your responsible seafood choices

The FDA in their encouragement to consume between 8 to 12 ounces of seafood per week advised avoiding tilefish from the Gulf of Mexico, shark, swordfish and king mackerel because of their higher mercury content. They strongly emphasized that this is very targeted advice and should not affect your seafood eating patterns because these specific fish are not popular in the U.S market and are subsequently rarely consumed on a regular basis.  

In short, their message is that consuming the seafood offered in the U.S. marketplace while pregnant is a responsible choice to help further your own personal health as well as the developmental health of your unborn child!

Now is time for you to eat more seafood!  Please use our Sea Port Go Blue! Plate Choose My Seafood for Sustainability® as your guide for choosing to eat a vast variety of seafood at the proper weekly frequencies.  By doing so you will advance the health of you and your unborn baby while also supporting sustainable seafood that will benefit all future mothers and their children.

GO BLUE! – FOR OUR HEALTH · FOR OUR ENVIRONMENT · FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Sincerely,

David Glaubke – Director of Sustainability Initiatives

The Ideal of the Perfectly Sustainable Seafood is an Unending Pursuit

Three years ago when Sea Port created the Go Blue!Seafood Sustainability Spectrum® for each of our seafood items (example above) we purposely indicated that there was no spectrum end-point that represented a lasting achievement of a perfectly sustainable seafood, but rather we showed a wave graphic that communicated that sustainability is an unending pursuit rather than a permanently attainable and static destination.

Sea Port believes that our physical world and all its living creatures are forever in a constant dynamic state of change with countless interconnections and this makes reaching the perfectly sustainable seafood ideal from wild fisheries and aquaculture inherently elusive and unobtainable in the long run.

However, Sea Port adamantly believes that efforts to produce seafood more sustainably should be just as perpetual as the constant state of change that is characteristic of our entire biosphere.  This will result in the most efficient use of our aquatic resources to advance the future of humanity.

Our seafood industry has historically been able to adapt to whatever Mother Nature has thrown at it.  However, today we are living in a new era in which negative environmental changes are created by humanity’s actions as it struggles to utilize the Earth’s resources in order to survive and prosper. This new era in the history of the world is coined the Anthropocene Epoch.   In this new era, the activities of humans are negatively affecting our entire biosphere  and threatening our ability to advance sustainable seafood production from both wild fisheries and aquaculture.  

For years, Sea Port has brought attention to these emerging human caused impacts that affect wild fisheries and aquaculture such as increasing ocean acidification and temperature; increasing marine dead zones; increasing loss of productive riparian and marine coastal habitats; and the increasing worldwide scarcity of freshwater.

Now is the time for the global seafood community to unite and cooperatively work toward mitigating, changing, and stopping the man-made negative impacts that foul the very big house we all live in; planet Earth.  This is our generation’s challenge in this new Anthropocene Epoch.  Sea Port is confident that by working together we can assure that our worldwide seafood production will get ever closer to that elusive ideal of the perfectly sustainable seafood.

Please catch our wave and participate in our unending pursuit of the perfectly sustainable seafood ideal as we boldly acknowledge and confront the emerging man-made environmental challenges of the new Anthropocene Epoch.

Sincerely,

David Glaubke – Director of Sustainability Initiatives 

Sea Port forecasts good news that seafood sustainability will continue to advance on many fronts in 2015

  

Protecting Bristol Bay:  

Over the past few years, Sea Port has submitted letters to the EPA and worked in cooperation with the New England Aquarium to call for prohibiting the habitat destroying activities of massive mining ventures in the Bristol Bay watershed of Alaska to protect its economically and culturally important salmonid resources for which it is world famous.   At the end of 2014, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum protecting the coastal waters of the Bay from oil and gas development.  This act unfortunately does not guarantee the safeguarding of the life-giving Bristol Bay watershed that provides the essential breeding and nursery grounds for the native salmon.  However, Sea Port believes that this presidential memorandum will add critical momentum going into 2015 for finally establishing lasting protection for this wondrous watershed which we believe is worthy of World Heritage designation. 

IUU Fishing (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated):

Sea Port foresees more international cooperative efforts coming in 2015 to tackle the critical sustainability issue of IUU fishing.  As Sea Port did in 2014, we will be offering our seafood industry input to NOAA to assist in solving this crucial  global problem that impedes many high seas and foreign fisheries from becoming more sustainable.

Increasing seafood consumption in order to advance sustainability:

Sea Port foresees that in 2015 the American consumer will gain a better understanding of the unique essential health benefits of eating a diverse variety of seafood and how doing so actually helps our environment when compared to choosing the land based animal protein alternatives.  Sea Port will continue to provide input to the FDA, EPA, USDA and the Seafood Nutrition Partnership in order to help push for increased seafood consumption in America.  We will also feature our Go Blue! Plate Choose My Seafood for Sustainability at industry events and on our website to give guidance to the American consumer in selecting from a vast variety of seafood items and eating them at the proper weekly frequencies in order to advance both human health and resource sustainability.

In 2015, Sea Port looks forward with great enthusiasm to continuing to boldly charge ahead on our Go Blue! initiative that champions the consumption of seafood to promote human health, sustainability, and environmental stewardship.  Please join us in this totally immersive pro-seafood quest so we can all make sure 2015 is truly a year in which seafood sustainability continues to advance.

Happy New Year!

Sincerely,

David Glaubke – Director of Sustainability Initiatives