Seafood

Until modern Americans decided to adopt what has become known as a “heart healthy” diet, seafood generally faced a dubious public. Caught in a series of sometimes contradictory objections, fish and shellfish enjoyed fairly low regard compared with red meat or even chicken. Still, as a natural resource open to anyone with the skill and technology to harvest it, almost all the favored food species have faced overfishing and dangerous levels of depletion. While seafood still does not rank near to meat in frequency of consumption, more people are eating fish more often than ever, and with wild stocks under stress from American and foreign fishing fleets, a wider variety of fish is taken and eaten than earlier in American history. Further, Americans consume a greater-than-ever amount of farm-raised fish. North America ranks third in world consumption of fish in the early 2000s.