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Seafood

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For the band, see Seafood (band).

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Image:Fried Fish and French Fries.jpg

Seafood is any sea animal or seaweed that is served as food or is suitable for eating. This usually includes seawater animals, such as fish and shellfish (including mollusks and crustaceans). By extension, in North America although not generally in the United Kingdom, the term seafood is also applied to similar animals from fresh water and all edible aquatic animals are collectively referred to as seafood.

Edible seaweeds are rarely considered seafood, even though they come from seawater and are widely eaten around the world. See the category of sea vegetables.

The harvesting of seafood is known as fishing and the cultivation of seafood is known as aquaculture, mariculture, or simply fish farming.

Seafood is a source of protein in many diets around the world.

1 History
2 Predicted collapse
3 Dishes
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

From the earliest age of human civilization, seafood has been an important food source: it can easily be hunted and gathered, even by those lacking power or speed. Basket-like traps have long been widely used to hunt fish in rivers and lakes. Sometimes, fish were speared just as one would hunt a small animal. Ancient Egyptian civilization used the symbol of fish for counting large numbers; they ate fish both dried and fresh. Observant Jews abstain from all shellfish due to kashrut. It is looked over often, but the rise of ancient Greek and Roman civilization was in no small part due to the abundant fish of the Mediterranean Sea.^{[citation needed]} Shellfish was a staple food in many locations and in the Jomon period of Japan; the amount of shellfish consumed and thrown away from that time is used to measure how many people lived in a certain area. Both Chile and Peru have a long tradition of seafood thanks the rich Hulmbolt current that feed a lot of shellfish. More recently Chile and Peru have had a dispute over the origyn of the Ceviche that is still unsolved.

[edit] Predicted collapse

Main article: Overfishing

Research into population trends of various species of seafood is pointing to a global collapse of seafood species by 2048 [1]. Such a collapse would occur due to pollution and overfishing, threatening oceanic ecosystems, according to some researchers.

A major international scientific study released in November 2006 in the journal Science found that about one-third of all fishing stocks worldwide have collapsed (with a collapse being defined as a decline to less than 10% of their maximum observed abundance), and that if current trends continue all fish stocks worldwide will collapse within fifty years.<ref>"'Only 50 years left' for sea fish", BBC News. 2 November 2006.</ref>

The FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2004 report estimates that in 2003, of the main fish stocks or groups of resources for which assessment information is available, "approximately one-quarter were overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion (16%, 7% and 1% respectively) and needed rebuilding."<ref>"The Status of the Fishing Fleet," The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture: 2004.</ref>

Organizations such as the National Fisheries Institute, however, disagree with such findings and assert that currently observed declines in fish population are due to natural fluctuations and that enhanced technologies will eventually alleviate whatever impact humanity is having on oceanic life.^{[citation needed]}