The Ghosts in Your Grocery Bag: How Overfishing Hides in Our Diet

I’m sorry to delve into something sad today, so if you’re feeling emotionally vulnerable and overly empathetic, scoot back and read something else. I wrote a great piece about Cruising with Wine you can read instead and dream about your next vacation.

Okay, you’ve been warned.

You don’t see them, but they’re there. In your frozen fish sticks and in the tuna melt at your favorite diner. They’re in the shrimp cocktail at a wedding buffet that you eat too many of and spoil your meal (who really wanted that mixed green salad anyway?).

Ghosts.

Not the ones that haunt old houses and that my husband listens to in stories at night, but the kind that once swam in the open ocean, pulled into nets by accident, then were discarded without ceremony or even a second thought.

They are the bycatch…the unintended, the unseen. For every fish we choose to eat, there are others we never meant to kill, and they still end up in the story. This is a tale of what we’re not being told when we shop the seafood aisle, of how collapsed fisheries, convenience culture, and global supply chains have made us complicit in a ghost story that spans oceans.

What Is Bycatch?

Bycatch is basically everything caught while fishermen are trying to catch something else, so sort of what it sounds like.

A boat could be out there searching for shrimp and pull up juvenile fish, crabs, sea turtles, sharks, or something else entirely. Longlines set for tuna can catch seabirds and nets can entangle dolphins and whales. It’s sort of common sense, but we don’t often think about the extra catch that can legally be kept and sold. Sometimes those little guys are released alive, or it’s thrown back after it’s already died. It’s not like they intentionally kill them, but they struggle in the nets or maybe are left on board too long before being thrown back.

It’s one of those words that sounds almost harmless until you understand what it actually means.

“Bycatch” makes it sound like an accidental extra side dish. In reality, it can include hundreds or thousands of animals that were never supposed to be in the net at all. NOAA’s definition includes fish that fishermen don’t want, can’t sell, or aren’t legally allowed to keep, along with turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds caught or entangled in fishing gear.

There also isn’t one honest number that describes how much bycatch comes with every piece of seafood.

It changes dramatically depending on the species, location, fishing method, season, regulations, and even the individual boat. Some fisheries have made enormous improvements by changing hooks, adding escape devices, avoiding certain areas, or fishing at different times. Others still pull far too much unintended life from the water.

That’s part of what makes the issue so hard to see. Two bags of shrimp can look exactly the same in the freezer aisle while carrying completely different environmental histories and repercussions.

The Fisheries We Nearly Ate Away

The ocean is enormous, so I understand why it once felt impossible that humans could make a meaningful dent in it.

I mean, have you seen the ocean? It feels fairly confident in its ability to outlast us. Although…if you go fishing a lot, it always seems like there are no fish in the entire thing when you just want one flounder to make for dinner.

Unfortunately for all of us, fish don’t reproduce as quickly as industrial fleets can find them.

Northern cod once supported one of the most important fisheries in the world. Then the population crashed so severely that Canada declared a moratorium on directed fishing in 1992. The fishery, the jobs built around it, and entire coastal communities were changed almost overnight. The stock has improved since its lowest point, but its recovery has taken literal decades.

Globally, the picture is complicated at best, but all political things are. The FAO’s most recent comprehensive assessment found that 35.5 percent of assessed marine fish stocks were overfished. At the same time, most global landings now come from stocks considered biologically sustainable, and the regions with strong science and management tend to perform far better.

That matters because it means collapse isn’t inevitable.

Pacific bluefin tuna is a perfect example. Its population reached historically low levels, and for years it appeared in almost every alarming article about overfishing, including the older version of this one (rewritten in 2026). International catch limits and protections were put in place, especially for young fish, and the stock was officially declared rebuilt in 2024.

Honestly, that’s incredible, and I’m glad that we can do these things when needed. It doesn’t erase how close we came, but it proves that regulation can work when countries cooperate and give fish enough time to grow up, reproduce, and be fish.

Convenience Masks Consequence

Shrimp is easy and I don’t know many people who don’t like it outside of all the allergic people (guilty).

It cooks in a few minutes, works in pasta, tacos, fried rice, scampi, curry, and basically anything involving garlic and butter. If you’ve ever seen Forest Gump, right about now I have all the things you can do with shrimp stuck in my head. I completely understand why the world eats so much of it.

U.S. shrimp consumption more than quadrupled between 1984 and 2023, and most of that increase was supplied by imported shrimp. By 2023, shrimp harvested from the Gulf accounted for only a small portion of the American market, while imported farm-raised shrimp dominated warm-water shrimp imports.

Seafood in general travels a lot. NOAA estimates that about 80 percent of the seafood Americans ate in 2023 came from foreign imports. Not so great for the environment in multiple ways, but I won’t get into that. Importing seafood isn’t automatically bad and there are plenty of responsible fisheries and farms that operate outside the United States.

The problem is that every additional handoff can make the history harder for an ordinary shopper to follow. The shrimp could be very well raised or caught in one country, processed in another, packed somewhere else, and sold beneath an American brand name that tells you almost nothing about the people or ecosystem behind it.

By the time it reaches us, it’s pink, peeled, deveined, frozen, and wonderfully convenient.

The complicated part has already been removed.

What Seafood Labels Can and Can’t Tell You

I used to think “wild-caught” was basically the environmental gold star of seafood labels. It sounds pure, a fish swimming freely in the ocean certainly feels nicer than a fish circling a crowded pen.

But in culinary school I learned that wild-caught simply tells you the animal came from the wild. It doesn’t tell you whether the population was healthy, what gear was used, how much bycatch occurred, or whether the fishery was well managed.

Farm-raised tells you even less on its own. Aquaculture includes everything from carefully managed shellfish farms to intensive systems with very different environmental and labor records.

Even species names can get confusing. The FDA maintains a remarkably large Seafood List because market names, common names, regional names, and scientific names don’t always line up neatly. Some names are legally acceptable for multiple related fish, while others are prohibited because they could mislead buyers. Talk about confusing.

A basic grocery-store label might tell you the species, country of origin, and whether it was wild or farmed. It usually won’t tell you the name of the boat, the exact fishing grounds, the gear used, how much unwanted catch came up with it, or how the workers were treated.

That information might exist somewhere in the supply chain (maybe), but it doesn’t always make it onto the package.

Shrimp pond facility with aerators and machinery

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Seafood

I love a bargain as much as anyone. The economy sucks ass, and I’m always looking for ways to make money or I’ve never stood in a grocery store and wished the shrimp cost more.

Still, exceptionally cheap seafood should make us a little curious. For more than one reason too, I mean, no one wants to get sick eating something from the sea that went bad but was cheap.

That low price can come from efficient farming, a plentiful harvest, or a genuinely well-run supply chain. It can also come from wages kept painfully low, weak enforcement, damaged ecosystems, or the ability to discard huge amounts of life that never become part of the final product.

The U.S. Department of Labor still identifies fish, shrimp, shellfish, and squid from certain countries as goods associated with risks of child labor or forced labor. Now, not every imported seafood product involves abuse, I just mean that the risk is real enough that price and appearance alone can’t tell us the whole story.

Cheap food always feels like a gift at the register, and it definitely is when you’re pinching pennies, but someone else is normally absorbing the missing cost in one way or another.

What Can We Actually Do?

I never want articles like this to end with “everything is terrible, good luck at Whole Foods.” Most of us are going to continue eating seafood, I mean, I certainly am. The goal is just to make the better choice more often without requiring a private investigator and a marine biology degree.

Look for an actual species name instead of something vague whenever possible. Check into where it came from and whether it was wild-caught or farm-raised. Those details don’t answer everything, but they give you somewhere to begin. If you can find a good farm that you trust try to buy their products. I do this with Snake River Farms for beef as well as Riverence for rainbow and steelhead trout in Idaho.

Certifications such as MSC for wild fisheries, ASC for aquaculture, and Fair Trade can be useful shortcuts, but keep in mind that no certification system is perfect, but reputable programs generally require more documentation and independent review than an unsupported leaf printed on a package. Seafood Watch is also helpful when you’re standing in the store trying to remember whether you were supposed to buy one kind of salmon or avoid another.

Restaurants can sometimes know more than what appears on the menu, especially when they buy directly from a seafood supplier. Ask your server what species it is, where it came from, and whether it was wild or farmed. A good restaurant should be proud to answer.

Mussels, clams, oysters, anchovies, and sardines can also be great choices. They tend to sit lower on the food chain, and responsibly farmed bivalves require no feed while filtering water as they grow. Win-win for the world with these guys. Most importantly, don’t treat “seafood” like one interchangeable ingredient. Eating a wider range of species spreads demand around and introduces you to fish that may be abundant locally but overlooked because everyone is busy ordering the same salmon, shrimp, cod, and tuna.

The truth is that nothing in the ocean exists alone. A small fish may feed a larger fish, a seabird, a seal, and several animals I’ve never heard of because marine biology contains approximately nine billion creatures with names that sound made up half the time. Juvenile fish are future breeding adults while sharks and other predators help shape the populations beneath them. Small reef fish graze algae or clean parasites from larger animals and then crabs, rays, turtles, and seabirds all occupy their own places in a system built through millions of years of trial and error.

When fishing keeps removing the wrong animals, the effect can travel far beyond the net. I’m also not talking about one single fish dying, because predation and death are obviously part of the ocean and everything else in this life. It’s when the same kind of animal is removed again and again at a rate the population can’t replace that a problem arises. Fisheries managers have to consider the health of the target species, the unwanted catch, and the wider ecosystem that depends on both.

Why We Feel So Disconnected From It

We’ve become so far removed from all of our food at this point, this really shouldn’t shock you. I mean, a shrimp tray looks nothing like a trawl net. A frozen fillet doesn’t even look like an animal at all, really. Its got no scales, eyes, head, habitat, or recognizable personality…it’s a tidy white rectangle wrapped in plastic and waiting for lemon or miso dressing. Preferably both.

That distance is part of the appeal though because most of us don’t want to imagine every stage of every food we eat. I’d never finish dinner and I’d feel a certain kind of way cooking it even.

Still, words such as “whitefish,” “seafood blend,” and “imitation crab” make it especially easy to forget that each piece began as a specific animal from a specific place. Once the species and origin disappear, it becomes much harder to care how it was caught.

Frozen seafood received an unfair trial in the original version of this article, which was why I wanted to rewrite that. It’s sort of like frozen fruit, which is picked at peak ripeness then saved for later. Freezing can preserve fish at excellent quality, extend its useful life, reduce spoilage, and make seafood more affordable. FDA guidance counts fresh, canned, and frozen fish alike as nutritious choices (not that I care much for what they say honestly).

A frozen fish can sometimes also be perfectly traceable. A fresh fish sitting beautifully on ice may have passed through a complicated supply chain. Temperature isn’t the deciding factor here, information is. I’d rather buy a clearly labeled frozen fillet from a well-managed fishery than a mysterious “fresh catch” with no species, source, or explanation attached to it.

Frozen is a preservation method, and anonymity is the problem.

Mercury, Microplastics, and What We Actually Know

Fish is extremely nutritious, which shouldn’t be brand new information to you. It provides protein, omega-3 fats, vitamins, minerals, and several nutrients that are difficult to replace in exactly the same combination. Lots of people have said it for a long time, and we know it to be “brain food”.

However…it can also contain mercury.

Nearly all fish and shellfish contain at least trace amounts of methylmercury, but most commonly eaten species don’t contain enough to create health problems for the average adult. The concern rises with certain large, long-lived predators because mercury accumulates through the food web over time. My wines professor at The Culinary Institute of America was married to a woman who had such bad mercury poisoning from fish that she became infertile.

That’s why FDA and EPA guidance focuses on variety and recommends choosing lower-mercury fish more often, especially for children and people who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Shrimp, salmon, sardines, clams, oysters, pollock, and many other popular choices fall into the lower-mercury categories.

Microplastics are a different conversation, but worth mentioning as well.

They’re present throughout aquatic environments, and scientists are studying their effects on marine life and the human body. The science around long-term human health effects is still developing, though. Realistically though, they’re already in our own obodies brains and blood as well though. The World Health Organization has identified major research gaps and says more evidence is needed to understand exposure and risk.

So yes, plastic pollution absolutely belongs in a conversation about ocean health, but it just shouldn’t be turned into a definitive medical claim before the evidence gets there.

Fishing Can Change the Fish Themselves

This part completely fascinates me because I live for this shit.

Commercial fishing often targets the largest animals because large fish contain more meat and bring more money. It makes perfect sense from a fishing perspective, right? Well…from an evolutionary perspective, it can get weird.

When the largest and fastest-growing fish are repeatedly removed before reproducing, smaller fish or fish that mature earlier may be more likely to pass on their traits. Over generations, selective fishing pressure can alter the size, growth, and reproductive patterns of an entire population.

Scientists call this fisheries-induced evolution. Researchers have found that size-selective fishing can affect traits such as body size, age of maturity, and reproductive capacity, although the response differs by species and environment. It’s basically evolution under extremely unnatural pressure. The fish that best survive industrial fishing aren’t necessarily the biggest, strongest, or most fertile…they’re the ones most likely to escape us.

Grief for the Ones We Don’t See

There’s something especially upsetting about an animal dying without ever becoming food, it feels like a waste of a life. A fish caught, counted, sold, cooked, and eaten became part of someone’s life. We can still question how it was harvested, but at least its death had a purpose we understand.

Bycatch can disappear without even that though. A juvenile fish thrown overboard or a seabird pulled under by a hook, even a turtle that suffocates in a net while a boat searches for shrimp. They don’t appear on the menu, or even in official catch totals at all. Those are the ghosts in the grocery bag…the living animals removed from the environment so invisibly that most of us never knew they were there.

As a sommelier, I’m trained to care almost obsessively about origin. We want to know the vineyard, soil, climate, grape, vintage, farming method, cellar, and person who made the wine. I can talk for an unreasonable amount of time about a drink made from fermented grapes…then seafood arrives at the table and we accept “white fish.”

The sea bass might’ve have crossed an ocean or the shrimp passed through several countries to get to your plate. The tuna may come from a population rebuilt through years of international sacrifice and management and the oyster filtered gallons of water as it grew fifty miles from the restaurant that you’re about to squeeze lemon on.

All of that story belongs to the flavor.

I still want the Muscadet with oysters, the Assyrtiko with grilled fish, and the cold glass of Albariño beside a plate of garlicky shrimp…I just want to know whose shrimp they are.

The best pairing begins before the bottle opens, with knowing what’s on the plate, where it lived, how it was raised or caught, and whether enough was left behind for someone else to taste it years from now.