I'm really interested in what the BP oil spill is going to do to our food supply. So when I came across this article today, I shuddered.
Consuming Blue Fin Tuna Is Like Barbecuing Pandas ran on Bloomberg's Web site about two months ago and was based on an interview with Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer and the National Geographic Society's Explorer-in-Residence, who recently wrote a book, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One.
It's hard to argue with her view that the spill is poisoning the ocean. "Toxins that get in the food chain will be there for some time to come," she says. And in her book, the blog notes, she hasn't been on a dive in the past 30 years without seeing garbage.
And if you love sushi, you might want to know what she has to say about tuna: Not only is catching it wasteful, but it often has high levels of "mercury, fire retardant and pesticide contamination."