Top tips to easily go green in your kitchen
There are many reasons for greenifying your kitchen.
Why choose sustainable seafood?
One of the many incredible facts about the ocean is that fish populations can recover and replenish if they are sustainably managed over the long-term.
At Fresh Prep, we work with sustainable seafood programs, suppliers, and partners to enable us to make responsible seafood choices.
Why it’s important to choose sustainable seafood
Your seafood choices matter. Healthy oceans are vital to life on earth. They supply much of the oxygen we breathe and help regulate our climate. Sustainable fishing results in the recovery of fish stocks and their habitats and aids the millions of people who depend on fisheries as a source of food and income. Empty seas cause both empty stomachs and empty pockets.
MSC certified and Ocean Wise recommended seafood – the difference explained
Fresh Prep has chosen to partner with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Certification Program. This partnership enables us to offer certified sustainable tuna in our recipes.
According to the MSC, if all fisheries used sustainable practices, they could produce 16 million more tonnes of seafood. This would meet the protein needs of 72 million more people.
We also work closely with Ocean Wise Seafood, a recommendation program that uses the sustainability criteria developed by Seafood Watch.
There are three unique Seafood Watch (SFW) Standards that Ocean Wise Seafood and Seafood Watch use to assess seafood sustainability. These include: wild capture fisheries, salmonid fisheries and aquaculture.
So how does MSC compare with Ocean Wise?
Ocean Wise is a recommendation program focused on tackling three major ocean challenges:
- Overfishing
- Ocean pollution
- Climate change
The conservation organization is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia with staff and initiatives across Canada.
Ocean Wise recognizes sustainable fishing and aquaculture practices to include:
- Harvest that ensures healthy and resilient stocks/populations
- Use of effective and adaptive regulations, management, and enforcement
- Limit negative impacts on habitats, non-target species, and the greater ecosystem
MSC differs from Ocean Wise as it is a certification program that runs the world’s most recognized program for sustainable fishing and seafood traceability through which fisheries and seafood companies are audited annually.
Certification provides the highest level of assurance that the product is verified to be sustainable, is
harvested legally, and is traceable back to its source.
Because Ocean Wise and MSC have different criteria for and approaches to sustainability, not all MSC certified seafood is Ocean Wise recommended, and vice versa.
For almost 25 years, the MSC has worked with fisheries, scientists, seafood companies, governments and NGOs around the world to build a ‘Big Blue Future’ of healthy oceans and sustainable seafood for today and in the future.
The MSC is the only program of its kind that meets best practice requirements set by the UN FAO, GSSI, and ISEAL. It outperforms all other wild seafood programs in the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI) benchmark.
Together, the joint vision of Fresh Prep and the MSC is for the world’s oceans to be teeming with life and seafood supplies safeguarded for this generation and generations to come.
Adopting the MSC’s fishery certification and ecolabel program helps Fresh Prep to contribute to the health of the oceans by:
- Supporting a program that actively contributes to combatting overfishing.
- Sourcing from fisheries that help protect and restore biodiversity of our oceans.
- Working together to transform the sustainability of the seafood market
When you see the MSC blue fish label on our recipes and Add-ons menu, you can trust that your seafood is:
Sustainably-fished – in a way that maintains the population’s long-term health and minimizes the impacts of fishing to the surrounding wildlife and ecosystem.
Verified – the source of the seafood is assured through supply chain traceability so you know it’s from a certified sustainable fishery.
Wild-caught – from the oceans, lakes, or rivers from wild populations.
In providing both MSC certified and Ocean Wise recommended seafood on our menu we are increasing the demand for ocean-friendly practices, while also taking the pressure off overfished species.
By shopping our menu of seafood, you can help ensure there are plenty more fish in the sea for generations to come.
