Let's skip on tuna in general then. It's not as if we had lack of choice for food in our supermarkets.
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Southern Fried Science is way ahead of you:
> The first thing that popped into your head was probably “ban tuna fishing”, which is a more politically correct way of saying “make it impossible for the world’s poor to have healthy balanced diets”. It’s just not feasible to ban purse seine fishing. If you’re interested in helping by “voting with your wallet”, you can support sustainably-caught tuna, which is caught with a rod and reel and has almost no bycatch, but this method makes tuna so much more expensive that it’s not a large-scale solution.
But that's not factually true. Take your pick of most legumes. They're cheaper, have more than enough protein as well as other nutrients, are more environmentally sustainable and don't require killing sentient creatures...
> Take your pick of most legumes. They're cheaper, have more than enough protein as well as other nutrients, are more environmentally sustainable and don't require killing sentient creatures...
Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins. (Also, there's probably no reasonable definition of sentience that includes all animals and excludes all plants.)
> Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins.
This is a red herring, based on misinformation about nutrition. It is not hard to fulfill your daily protein needs and get in all your essential amino acids and maintain a healthy calorie intake while eating a diet of legumes, grains, and vegetables. It can be done for a fraction of the price of a omnivore's diet and can be a lot better nutritionally than downing tuna every day (i.e., there's more opportunities for variety).
> there's probably no reasonable definition of sentience that includes all animals and excludes all plants.
There are a few, but it actually is largely irrelevant. If you stop eating animals you also consume less plants. Every time you eat an animal you have to consider that in order to raise that animal it had to eat a lot of plants that you could've been eating instead. Raising animals is massively inefficient energy-wise, which is why our plant consumption goes down when people stop eating meat.
So really there's no need to draw a "sentience line" in the sand. Assuming everything is sentient, vegetarian diets are better for both plants and animals. But even if it were necessary to draw this sort of line, it would make a fair deal of sense to say that anything without a nervous system is at least relatively less likely to be sentient. There are some arguments for plant sentience due to their limited molecular signalling responses to harmful stimuli, but there is definitely a lot less evidence to support that hypothesis than there is to support the hypothesis that tuna are sentient.
> Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins.
>> The reason for the bean/grain combo is nutrition and protein. When you combine beans and grains, their different amino acid makeups form to combine complete proteins. They also each contain different nutrients and grains are higher in calories. There's a reason that some grain was always the staple of the local diet, whether wheat, barley, rice, corn or whatever. "Bread is the staff of life."
>> You'll live better on a bean/grain combo than just beans along. Ask the native Americans.
from _MikeK_, via http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?t=181260
Also..
>> Every time legumes like beans, lentils, and peanuts are combined with grains like wheat, rice, and corn, a complete protein is born.
from http://greatist.com/health/complete-vegetarian-proteins
How would banning tuna fishing make it impossible for the world's poor to have a balanced diet? Is it because it would also ban subsistence fishing?
I would guess it's because tuna is a very cheap source of lots of protein: 100g of tuna is 29g protein for a fraction of a buck (canned). I'm pretty sure that's the cheapest source of protein available (in $/g). eggs are not as cheap, and they don't keep anywhere as long as a stack of canned tuna.
In places I've lived recently, canned tuna isn't the cheapest source, though it's cheap-ish. Canned chicken is cheaper in most of the USA. Even fresh or frozen meats can be cheaper, e.g. chicken in the USA, or pork in Denmark. As well as lower-end sausages and other processed meats. Plus, nearly all vegetable sources of protein, like beans or lentils, are cheaper than those.
I would also not suggest canned tuna as a staple protein, because of its high mercury levels. It's okay to eat occasionally, but eating ~10 cans/week as your main source of protein isn't a good idea. The safe consumption quantity for a typical adult is in the range of 2-3 cans per week of chunk-light, or 1 can/week of albacore.
Here in the UK, if you don't mind buying in larger cans, salmon gives you practically the same protein for your money. Example from the most popular supermarket chain:
Tuna -- 26.4g protein for 0.55GBP (48g/GBP): http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=283723541
Salmon -- 84.8g for 1.80GBP (47g/GBP): http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=258098027
And the salmon is from Alaska, where the fishery is well managed and sustainable.
Not that I want to tell you what to do or not to do in your own kitchen but please be very careful with canned fish from larger cans, use the whole can at once or transfer the contents to another container that you can properly close.
That tuna says it was "fished by pole and line" though, which
a) is really surprising - someone above said that made tuna much more expensive, which is also what I'd intuitively expect;
b) seems to put it ethically around the same level as the salmon.
I think lentils, chickpeas, soy and co. are the cheapest protein. In general in Italy canned tuna (granted it's solid and in olive oil) is never cheaper than 10 euro/kg, and can be as expensive as 35 euro/kg. That's more expensive than fresh chicken, pork and many cuts of beef.
Some really good threads on fermented foods have come up recently (1,2,3). In relation to these healthy, cost-effective protein sources, this legume, soy, afaict, needs fermentation before ingestion (0). See # What Soy Products are Good For You?
0: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/09/1... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699993 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10603067 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524582
Hemp seed has 36g of protein per 100g and is a lot cheaper and environmentally more sustainable to produce, contains omega acids in the perfect ratio for humans (but dose not have the same bio-availability), dose not have high levels of mercury (that's more of a problem with farmed fish not wild).
This seems like one optimal protein source, since we could also squeeze out its oil and use it for diesel fuel. Then, Spirulina, can act as another protein source which can also provide bio-available essential fatty acids.
How do farmed tuna have more mercury than wild harvested? They're both swimming in the same ocean eating the same pilchards.
I'm presuming it's because farmed tuna are fed a diet low in mercury vs. wild tuna eating things that have concentrated mercury over time?
You have it backwards. The farmed has been found to have higher mercury content.
What about beans?
> “ban tuna fishing”, which is a more politically correct way of saying “make it impossible for the world’s poor to have healthy balanced diets”.
This is not true necessarily. More tuna mean less median fishes, and less median fishes eating mean more anchovies and small fishes alive, thus pound for pound, more food for humans. After the overfishing of tuna in europe anchovies collapsed almost at the same time.
Or just cut way down, as a student tuna was pretty much a staple for me, but these days I have made a concious choice to eat it only about once every couple of months.