The Missing Ingredient: Fish as Food.
Introducing the Missing Ingredient series!
In 2025, I completed a Master’s program in sustainable food systems to explore the links between biodiversity loss, behavior change, climate change, and food.
One of my biggest “a-ha” moments from the program is how often I ignored the role food plays in conservation projects, even though food is central to everything.
The Missing Ingredient series revisits wildlife conservation programs I’m familiar with and examines how incorporating a food systems perspective could improve or enhance them.
Let’s dig in!
Seeking a sea change in fisheries
My skills as a behavior change strategist and communicator are fairly transferable, which means I get to work on a variety of conservation topics.
Repeatedly, my work has brought me to the ocean, where I’ve had opportunities to support near-shore marine programs across multiple countries, all focused on protecting vital fish species and marine habitats from overfishing.
The irony of so much of my career being spent working on fisheries is that the ocean pretty much scares the shit out of me. But that’s a topic for another day.
Sustainable fishing programs tend to be layered, complex programs that aim to improve how marine life and habitats are measured, monitored, and managed by local governments and fishing-dependent communities.
As you might imagine, I thought about fish A LOT during these projects.
→ I thought of fish as indicators of the ecosystem’s health. And I thought about how hard it is to measure things that move around constantly.
→ I thought of them as a form of livelihood for coastal communities: fish are things to be caught.
→ I thought of fish as being culturally significant to the countries where I was working.
→ I thought of them as a resource that needed to be managed.
→ I even thought of fish as something that’s bought and sold at the market.
I feel like I’m having a Bubba Gump moment here.
The point is, I thought and talked about fish in so many different ways. And yet, somehow, amid all those internal and external conversations about fish, I never viewed the species we were protecting and conserving as food.
The Missing Ingredient: Fish as Food.
To clarify, I knew that fishers and the rest of the community were eating fish. I saw fish being sold at the market and cooked at the local restaurants. I ate delicious, locally caught fish many times myself.
But I spent nearly all my time thinking about the importance of fish to the marine ecosystem, not the importance of fish to the dinner plate.
Ever since I started diving into the world of sustainable food systems, I’ve had a nagging question at the back of my mind: What did I miss in these projects by not viewing fish as food?
Adding a dash of food systems.
Adding a food systems perspective to our projects requires us to expand our conservation problem trees, systems maps, and concept models to explore other contributing factors and ripple effects of our interventions.
Here are some food-related questions I would ask today if I were starting a new fisheries project:
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What does the local and regional food system look like in this location: what is grown, sold, and consumed within the community? Which ingredients are imported from other areas or exported out?
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What are the traditional foodways (i.e., eating habits and culinary practices) in the area that must be preserved? What recent food trends (positive or negative) have emerged or been introduced to the area?
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How much of the fish caught do fishing communities consume directly versus sell? Who buys and who eats the fish they sell?
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What other food is available to local fishing communities? How expensive are the ingredients? How healthy and nutritious are the available options?
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What do community members enjoy about eating fish? Which recipes or preparation methods do they use most frequently?
Once a fish is caught, it enters a whole new world (no, not The Little Mermaid kind). Out of the sea, fish take on a new form of economic importance, nutritional value, cultural relevance, market demand, and access and equity concerns.
All of these factors affect whether a conservation program for fish will be successful in the long run.
Re-mixing the project.
Although expanding the scope of our work feels daunting, the upside is that it opens the door to new solutions that can increase our likelihood of making an impact.
Ingredient substitutes.
For example, we could explore adding regenerative aquaculture systems to grow sustainable sea vegetables and bivalves (oysters, mussels, etc.) in the area, while also protecting fish species.
Regenerative aquaculture offers a sustainable seafood alternative that reduces fishing pressure on vulnerable species, creates new jobs in the community, improves the health of the ocean, and provides another set of nutrient-packed ingredients.
Limited menu offerings.
With a more detailed understanding of the community’s traditional foodways, we could explore whether it’s possible to promote specific fish species to catch and eat based on their sustainability.
Simply pushing ourselves to break down the concept of “fish” into separate species – or more bluntly, into separate “products” – reveals that they’re not all valued or desired equally when being sold, bought, or consumed.
Local first.
In areas where fishers struggle with food security, we could support fishing cooperatives by allocating a percentage of the daily catch for direct consumption by fishing families.
This could be expanded to support regional networks, ensuring that a portion of the fish caught locally is enjoyed by nearby families, restaurants, and businesses so that healthy, fresh fish stay close to home.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce of possibilities.
Adding a food systems approach introduces new solutions, audiences, and approaches that can increase the sustainability of fishing, provide additional health and environmental benefits, and strengthen interventions.
Finding the Missing Ingredient in Your Project
Is the species you’re protecting also one that is eaten? If so, experiment with viewing it as a meal to surface new questions about how habits and preferences can shift. I recommend starting with “Why is this species eaten?” and then moving to Who? What? When? Where? And How?
Dive into these additional resources about fish and food webs:
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Leong, K. M., Ingram, R. J., Kleiber, D., Long, S. H., Mastitski, A., Norman, K., Weng, C., & Wise, S. (2024). Aligning fisheries terminology with diverse social benefits. Marine Policy, 170, 106377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2024.106377.
- IPES-Food. (2025, January 29). Food from somewhere. https://ipes-food.org/report/food-from-somewhere/.