Can Vegan Seafood Save Our Oceans From Collapse?
With around 2.7 billion wild fish killed every single day, the race is on to find a sustainable solution and help save our wildlife and oceans. That’s where vegan seafood comes in.
With figures estimating that over 2.7 billion wild fish are killed every single day, there is an increasing urgency to find a more sustainable and kind solution to meet the global demand for seafood products.
The current fishing industry uses super trawlers that utilize mile-wide nets to dredge the seabed for anything and everything in their destructive paths. And there’s now also fish factory farms, where fish are kept in highly crowded and often filthy conditions with large levels of disease and parasites like sea lice.
These methods are devastating oceans and plundering the wildlife that live there.
But there’s hope: everyone from the world’s biggest food companies to tech-savvy startups, are now developing the answer to sustainable fish and crustaceans: vegan seafood.
Vegan seafood delivers the taste and texture of the most popular seafood products without the need to farm and slaughter over a trillion fish each year. That’s good news for animals, humans, and the planet.
So what is vegan seafood exactly?
Popular companies like Good Catch and Gardein already have tasty alternatives readily available in stores, from Good Catch’s varieties of fish-free tuna to Gardein’s fishless fillets and even crabless cakes.
Good Catch’s selection of vegan seafood. Credit: Good Catch
But the vegan seafood industry is also embracing the technological wonders of lab-grown food too.
Innovative, cutting-edge startups are employing food scientists and leading nutritionists to create lab-grown versions of seafood - that means they look and taste just like seafood farmed from the sea, but they use the same cells to grow the product in a lab rather than on a sentient fish. Singapore-based Shiok Meats for example, just unveiled the world’s first lab-grown lobster meat, which could prevent thousands of sentient lobsters from being boiled alive every day for consumption.
Shiok Meats’ first ever cultured lobster meat featured in lobster gazpacho and lobster terrine. Credit: Shiok Meats
Advancements like these are huge news and are predicted to disrupt and change the food industry. And investors and retailers are rushing to meet the demand for vegan seafood: San Francisco-based startup New Wave Foods recently raised $18 million in a Series A funding round to roll out its vegan shrimp to foodservice, and Trader Joe’s just announced that it’s looking into adding vegan seafood soon.
With sentient fish being killed in their millions every day, and our ocean’s fisheries predicted to collapse by 2050, transforming the food industry’s reliance on wild and farmed fish towards animal-free alternatives can’t come quickly enough.
Want to hear more about how vegan seafood is disrupting the food industry? Listen to Species Unite chat with Chris Kerr, the Godfather of vegan venture capital and co-founder of Gathered Foods, known for its Good Catch plant-based seafood products.
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