Groceries and Boating
-At the Grocery Store
Packaging
Plastic, plastic, everywhere. We have become a society that values convenience above almost anything else. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the amount of plastic packaging we encounter every day. Plastic is cheap, plastic is lightweight, and plastic is forever.
After World War II the plastic industry began to develop polypropylene and polyethylene for all sorts of industrial and domestic applications. Like so many post war products, i.e. chemicals and fertilizers, the scientists of the day were more concerned with the short-term benefits of plastic than they were with the long-term impact their wonder product would make on the environment.
The extent that plastic has infiltrated the marine ecosystem is overwhelming. Not only do we see bags and bottles and all things plastic at so many beaches, but this stuff may also be finding its way into the cellular tissue of our bodies.
Close to 90% of the junk floating in our oceans is plastic. According to a 2006 article by Kenneth R. Weiss, “a piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach last year bore a serial number that was traced to a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944.” Unless it has been picked up, washed ashore, or been consumed, almost every piece of plastic that has found its’ way to the ocean is still there.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in an area called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This particular patch of Ocean is located northeast of Hawaii and stretches nearly to California. This million square mile wasteland is full of floating plastic. A rotating air mass and slow moving surface currents combine to produce a massive clockwise flow of debris. Some of the garbage occasionally breaks off and reaches Hawaiian and other pristine beaches, but most of it just spirals around. A 2001 survey of the area sponsored by the philanthropist, Captain Charles Moore, estimated that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the gyre for every one pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Put another way, 3 million tons; 6 billion pounds, of plastic is spinning around this one part of the Ocean.
Since most people will never sail through this stretch of sea some might say, so what? Out of sight is out of mind. Other than being foolish and irresponsible, this attitude neglects to consider the molecular behavior of plastic and how it may infiltrate the food chain.
Because plastic is a man made, synthetic material it does not break down, or biodegrade, like organic substances such as paper or fabric might. But plastic does photodegrade. Exposed long enough to sunlight, plastic will break into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually disintegrating into individual molecules of plastic. As if this wasn’t bad enough, these little plastic blobs act as sponges, absorbing all types of toxins. Japanese scientists discovered that these poisons can become nearly a million times more concentrated in plastic than they can floating around on their own.
Now imagine a school of tuna or salmon or any other ocean going main course happens to swim through some of this man made soup. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to believe mister fish just might ingest some of this stuff. How much is absorbed and how much passes on is for the guys with advanced degrees to debate. But go swallow a handful of plastic pellets that has been soaking in oily pesticides and tell me how you feel.
The point of course is to avoid plastic on your boat at all costs. This is much easier said than done, but we must start somewhere.
While you fill your shopping cart with groceries try to minimize or even eliminate plastic. Instead of buying the 24 pack of handy water bottles-that are usually wrapped in a big sheet of plastic- grab a gallon or two of drinking water and use refillable personal water bottles on board. Not only will you save money, precious garbage space, and the environment, you will probably stay healthier too. Instead of swapping germs by grabbing your kids’ identical jug of backwashed H2O, each crewmember can mark their own earth friendly stainless steel water bottle. (More on this idea later.)
Personal sized plastic fruit cups, yogurt containers, juice boxes, and on and on can all be replaced with more Ocean friendly packaging. Whatever the item, if it is plastic look for alternatives, they are out there.
Once you reach the checkout counter the inevitable question is coming. Paper, or plastic? If you must, choose paper. Better yet, bring a canvas shopping bag or two with you and load them up. If you are new to this green stuff, plan on feeling a little self-conscious here. It will take a few trips to get over it, just remember the North Pacific gyre.
Food
Boat food is usually summer time food. Burgers, hot dogs, steak, fish and chicken- easy BBQ chow. Fruits and veggies, pasta, chips, the list goes on. The first thing to consider when you are stocking up is to buy, whenever possible, certified organic food.
If you want to learn about the health benefits of eating organic food there is no shortage of information out there. As a green boater, however, the reason for eating organic has more to do with the water you are on than the body in which you reside.
Non-organic food is routinely treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. Organic food is not. Through various means these chemicals inevitably find their way into the waters we enjoy. When fertilizers are introduced into either fresh or salt water they simply do their job, feeding the plants and especially algae that live there. Algae does not know when it is full. As it eats it grows, and as it grows existing plants begin to die. Microscopic bacteria eat the decaying material, and like the algae, the bacteria multiply. Bacteria require oxygen to survive. When the bacteria increase in number they remove more and more dissolved oxygen from the water, eventually suffocating the fish and larger aquatic creatures unable to flee.
Algal blooms can also produce powerful neurotoxins that are harmful to anything they touch, including people. The infamous red tide and the lesser know blue tide are algal blooms. While there does not yet appear to be definitive scientific proof linking red tides to fertilizer discharge, the red tides miraculously occur quite often in coastal areas that are linked to intense agricultural activity. Hmmmm?
Pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics produce all sorts of nasty problems in the waters they sneak into. Would you buy fish at the market if you knew it had this stuff in it? If it is not organically raised fish you probably already are.
Organic or not, the fish you buy for the weekend barbecue on board can have an impact on our marine environment. Through tricky marketing campaigns and outright deception the worlds’ seafood salesmen have done their best to convince us that eating their product is both good for us and good for the planet. Like many things we are told, the devil is in the details. Most fish, if properly raised, caught, and prepared is good for us. The problem, however, is that many fish we think are beneficial are often raised and caught in ways that do more damage than we may know.
How to cook your feast in an environmentally friendly way will be covered in chapter five.
The Audubon Society publishes a handy, wallet-sized chart that advises consumers which seafoods to enjoy, be cautious with, and avoid completely. You can download and print this guide from their website at
http://seafood.audubon.org/
The farming of salmon, for example, is believed to produce a multitude of environmental problems. Being businessmen who want to sell a lot of fish, most salmon farmers raise as many fish as possible in as small an area as they can. This often leads to diseases that are controlled by adding antibiotics to the food the salmon eat. This salmon food is usually made up of ground fish that are often caught in huge nets that may cause extensive damage to the seafloor. In addition, dolphins, seals and other large animals are swept up in these nets and killed.
According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program it takes approximately three pounds of feed fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon, hardly a sustainable practice. In addition, a recent study suggested that farmed salmon might contain up to 16 times the PCBs, (polychlorinated biphenyl’s-. i.e. nasty man made chemicals) found in wild salmon. While there is dispute over this number, if farm raised salmon have only twice the toxins of their wild cousins that is too much for me to feed my kids. Finally, most farm raised salmon meat is actually white-the farmers die it red for marketing reasons. Yuck!
Everyone’s favorite, shrimp, also has some pretty dirty laundry. Depending on where it comes from and how it is caught, a shrimp ‘s journey to your grocery store can leave a destructive, deadly trail. Many shrimp are caught using huge nets dragged behind big powerful boats called trawlers. In addition to often tearing up the seafloor, these nets are not particular about what they scoop up. For a shrimp fisherman anything he brings aboard other than shrimp is called “bycatch.”
These unwanted victims are almost always thrown overboard, usually dead or dying. Estimates vary but some watchdog groups believe up to 90% of the total catch on a shrimp boat may be bycatch. What this means to us shrimp lovers is that for every 10 pounds we enjoy on the barbecue, 90 pounds of swimming, thriving sea life is gone.
Scallops, tuna, cod, the list of troubling seafood is growing. With a little effort there is much you can learn about what is really being sold to you at the fish counter. In this books Appendix there are numerous sources listed where you can explore this subject further. Suffice it to say you should.
The other traditional main course boat foods-beef, chicken and even pork chops all have similar tales to tell about how they affect our waters. The same is true for the fruits and vegetables, milk or juice, and all the other foods you enjoy on your boat. You might ask how can a steak from a cow raised in Kansas, or an apple from Washington state, affect a South Pacific coral reef?
Without getting too involved here the answer lies in the fact that planet Earth is a closed system. Other than the sunlight that powers all things and some gas and heat that sneaks into space, what happens on this planet stays on this planet. Any process-be it in Kansas, Washington, or anywhere else that introduces potentially toxic material into that system affects the entire system. To what degree is debatable and I do not have the letters after my name to argue the particulars. But common sense is common sense. Organic food is better for the Ocean, plain and simple.
