The real kicker is that if you look closely at the sources listed on many brands of bottled water (I dunno about your particular brand), they disclose that the water comes from a *municipal water supply* (as opposed to some mythical mountain stream). Municipal supply = tap water. So basically many of these companies are bottling the tap water that we already pay for with our taxes, and then selling it back to us for hundreds of times the amount we already paid.

So between that, the fossil fuels for transport that you mentioned, and the BPA-leaking plastic (which is made from fossil fuels) containers it comes in, bottled water really burns me. The EPA doesn’t regulate bottled water, but it sure as heck regulates tap water—so I’m putting my money on them.

To cut down on the chlorine in tap water, though, for now we have a Brita filter for our tap water. And it’s on the list to make our own charcoal filter (you can re-use the charcoal by putting it in the oven to re-activate it) so we don’t have to keep throwing the Brita ones away.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope that helps!

Yer Mum and I stopped eating farmed salmon, after I learned the filets we were selling came from Chile. They would arrive in 20-pound, styro boxes, packed in dry ice, via overnight delivery, twice a week. Chile today, gone tomorrow. Sold where salmon run wild. Or used to, anyway.

Your points are well taken about how far foodstuffs have to fly, nowadays, and all the refrigeration required to sustain shelf life. Seafood is an egregious example of it. Seafood has become a global industry, and the modern technological wonders have put it out of people’s minds that once upon a time, people went fishing for it. At our fish market on the water, folks would ask me where the fantail shrimp came from. Vietnam. No, no, some would reply, I don’t even want to think about what they swam in. But that’s more to the point about the ick-factor of fish pens.

Great comment. We’ve got some issues about fishing rights here, too—especially for shellfish like the famed geoduck. Tribal land, the DNR, private interests, and hobby diggers are all butting heads about that one. I try to stay out of it by avoiding geoduck altogether (though it is tasty, I must say). But I know these issues are everywhere—I’d turn to farmed seafood but aquaculture is a whole ‘nuther kettle of…uh…fish.

I figure that as consumers we’re voting with our dollar; hopefully with enough awareness to go around the demand might eventually shift enough to change the supply to something more sustainable. Oregon is working on bar codes to go with every fish for sale there, so the customer can track where it came from:

http://bit.ly/knMGy

I’m interested to see how it goes; I’d love to see something like that here.

Indeed, it’s your lobsta that’s become a robust, healthy, sustainable fishery. For one thing, like your crabs, dem bugs eat dead things, a place for everything, and everything in its place. For another, dem bugs flock to dead things in traps like ants to a sugar cube. It’s only the ones not smart enough to leave the trap that get harvested at the surface, and the little ones thrown back are measured with calipers. But, I think it’s also a human factor that keeps lobstering sustainable: the territoriality is ancient and tribal. Every corner of water is marked, and one can get shot out there. Maritime law enforcement is stretched so thin, they spend a lot of their time just helping everyone get along.