If you love fish you should always have some canned tuna on hand. It’s an affordable source of protein and has a ton of other nutritional benefits. This fish can be added to a leafy green salad or made into a tasty tuna salad with a little mayonnaise and some seasoning. However if you want your food to be as environmentally friendly as possible there are a few terms to look out for when buying canned tuna at the grocery store. In particular there’s a wide range of labels that will tell you whether the fish was caught with a net a purse seine or individually with a fishing line (the latter being the best option).
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What is the most environmentally friendly canned tuna?
The tuna industry is huge in the United States because the average American eats so much of it. As a country the U.S. consumes about 1 billion pounds of canned or packaged tuna per year. This means that tuna fishing must meet the demand which can have a negative impact on the environment due to the hasty way of catching so much fish at once.
It’s worth checking the labels of your tuna carefully to see if the fish inside it has been sustainably caught. Pole-and-line caught is probably the best term to look for as this means that each fish has been caught individually rather than in a net. Large nets lead to something called bycatch which occurs when other marine animals such as sharks or sea turtles get caught in the net because it’s so big. The sharks and turtles often die as a result so pole-and-line caught means that you’re buying tuna that has unlikely killed any other marine animals.
Troll-caught tuna is another similarly good term. This process involves using multiple fishing lines with bait attached to them specifically designed to attract albacore tuna. The lines are attached to a boat or vessel that is moving across the water and the tuna quickly swims towards the bait. Since this technique targets tuna it is another method of catching that limits bycatch.
