This article was published in International Aquafeed Magazine - April 2020 issue

The current fascination with the environmental, especially climate change, impacts of food is not the challenge for aquaculture that it is for land animal protein production. The EAT-Lancet report emphasises this position.

The report mentions the importance of seafood currently (3.1 billion people derive 20% of their daily intake of animal protein from aquatic systems), and states that aquaculture could “help steer production of animal source proteins towards reduced environmental effects and enhanced health benefits”. There is an enormous opportunity for aquaculture (and fisheries) to make more out of this narrative. Food production strategy, environmental impacts, and product nutritional quality are intertwined. The rise of meat-free strategies, including consumption of meat substitutes or having meat-free dietary periods seems, in reality, to adopt principally a vegetarian or vegan approach to nutrition.

Even before the issue of environmental impacts of food became so widely acknowledged, there were some very good examples of how nutritional strategies impact human health. One need go no further than look at the inadequate consumption of long chain omega-3 fatty acids to understand how, even with the benefit of all the information and evidence regarding health benefits, consumption levels remain well below health advisory minima. Now that food environmental impacts have risen up the agenda for the consumer, there is potential for additional nutritional effects. As is often the case with human nutrition, the issue is one of surviving or thriving – or adequate nutrition versus optimal nutrition, and the consumer is at the heart of these choices.

Globally, there are increasing constraints on resources and this is not a surprise to any of the academics that had been looking at food production, or natural resource management, over the last few decades. Neither is it a surprise to anyone involved in ingredients, feed, or animal protein production sectors as they have had to balance costs within a changing economic framework. The repercussions of some of those changes have been impacts on the nutritional content of our food, including changing fatty acid profiles in some proteins (e.g. chicken, salmon), as well as declining micronutrient (e.g. vitamin and mineral) profiles.

The interesting thing about the seafood sector is that – unlike the land animal sector - the nutritional content of wild fish is largely unchanged over time. Wild fish remain the excellent nutritional packages that they always were. Consequently, the nutritional profile of marine ingredients derived from this raw material – whether whole fish or byproduct – is generally as nutritious as it always has been. These ingredients provide superior qualities through farmed animals, to the consumer. The important thing in the future will be to use this material strategically in order to achieve the best results from it in terms of environmental benefits, nutrition and global food security.

Neil Auchterlonie