The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

102 / the world peace diet
tions close to shore. As boats go farther out, they stay out longer. When
fish are hauled into the boats, they are dumped in tanks in the hull
where they slowly die, defecating and crushing the fish beneath them.
This often goes on for many days, the dead and dying fish piled atop
each other with open wounds, workers pouring antibiotics into the fecal
soup to keep infection in check. Seafood is the leading cause of food poisoning
in the United States. 18 There is virtually no governmental inspection
of seafood before it is sold to markets and the public, and recent
studies by Consumer Reports showed that over twenty-five percent of
the fish they examined for sale were “on the brink of spoilage,” over
half the grocery store samples of “red snapper” were actually other
species, and half of swordfish samples exceeded the FDA’s action level
for nerve-damaging methylmercury. E. coli, histamine, and other dangerous
substances were also detected. 19
The carnage caused by modern factory fishing methods is horrific.
Huge trawlers, using satellite and radar technology and even helicopters
and airplanes, deploy nets that reach to the ocean floor and bring up virtually
everything in their path. The fish are often pulled rapidly from
such depths that they suffer decompression. Their internal organs may
burst and their eyes pop out, as they die an excruciating death through
suffocation, crushing, or evisceration. In the course of this marine stripmining,
an enormous number of sea creatures that are “unprofitable”
are hauled in. This so-called “bycatch” of certain fish, turtles, dolphins,
sea birds, and other animals is thrown back into the ocean mostly dead
or severely wounded. Every year, this adds up to about twenty-five million
tons of dead and dying sea animals, roughly a third of the total
that’s dragged in. A recent Duke University study, for example, found
that over 300,000 sea turtles are killed annually just by commercial
long-line fishing operations. 20 According to Environmental Defense:
Bycatch can include juvenile commercial fish, sea turtles, whales,
seabirds, dolphins and any other sea creature that’s not commercially
desirable. Shrimp trawling throws away an average of five pounds of
bycatch for every pound of shrimp caught, including up to 150,000
endangered sea turtles every year. Methods of capture that can result
in high bycatch are gill nets, purse seines and bottom trawling. 21