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The New Seafood Watch App for Android |
I love seafood, but I have read enough to know that my gastronomical preferences might be contributing to the demise of some of my favorite fish! Two-thirds of fish stock worldwide require rebuilding. Aquaculture is now responsible for half the seafood consumed on the planet. Some aquaculture practices are very harmful to the environment while many are environmentally responsible. Enter Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch app, which I now keep on my iPhone and refer to all the time. MBA is a world leader in seafood research and consumer education. This app advises which seafood are responsible choices from a sustainability viewpoint. I highly recommend it. — Perk Perkins Orvis CEO
Remember the days when you went to the store, bought what you needed and went home again? Now there are labels for organic, Fair Trade, eco-friendly and a whole host of other types of foods. Welcome to the age of the conscious consumer. All of us are beginning to recognize that our choices have an impact on our planet and that through thoughtful consumerism we can make a difference.
And it’s not just consumers. One of our conservation partners, Monterey Bay Aquarium, is walking the walk, and taking the lead in helping us all tread more lightly on our planet.
Monterey Bay’s Seafood Watch program is always looking for ways to help the conscious consumer make ocean-friendly choices. Over the past 11 years, they’ve distributed, with the help of nearly 200 partners, more than 36 million guides that help consumers across the U.S. make the best choices in sustainable seafood.
Recently, they went high tech and this month launched our popular Seafood Watch app for the Android. The app has been available for the iPhone for over a year, and has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
In December, MBA launched a new feature for the app, dubbed Project FishMap. Like Yelp and other user-generated content opportunities, Project FishMap lets you tag places (grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) where you’ve found sustainable seafood. There are more than a million restaurants and stores in FishMap, but you can add to it too. Since they launched the feature in December they’ve had more than 1,200 individuals tag more than 2,000 seafood items in 400 cities!
If you own an Android and care about eating sustainable seafood and making wise decisions, this app is for you. It uses Project FishMap too and helped Monterey Bay Aquarium create this living map of all the places in the U.S. you can be a conscious consumer – with a little help from a few thousand friends! Join them today.