Given that we work hard on this blog to encourage seafood consumption, any issue that affects consumption is of interest to us.
Last week I contacted the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my go-to source for information about seafood sustainability and safety, and asked them for their thoughts about eating seafood originating in Japan.
Ken Peterson wrote back within a couple of hours with this response:
Thanks for asking. As with the oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, no immediate and quantifiable impacts on the safety of seafood that's reaching the market in the United States.
Public health officials are responsible for monitoring seafood safety, whether it's spoilage or contaminants. That's going to be the primary line of defense.
We create the seafood reports on which we base our recommendations on data gathered over a period of time. If anything turns up in the data that warrants a new recommendation, you can be sure it will factor into our work.
I think what he is saying is that there hasn't been enough opportunity to gather the information on which a recommendation can be based. Many consumers are simply choosing to stay away.
When searching the Internet for this post, it seemed as though the most threatening sounding links came from websites that had more of an overall alarmist tone. I did find this story from March 18, 2011 on NPR and am providing it for your benefit.
Seafood and its nutrients are very important to health. If you choose not to eat seafood of Japanese origin, be sure to find a substitute or take a supplement.
And when evaluating the data, be sure your sources are basing their recommendations on science, not on sound bites most likely to generate their own website ratings.