Do Fish Fart?

Wild Alaska Pollock

Picture of nephew Nick wearing this T-shirt proclaiming the wonders of Wild Alaska Pollock shows up on my screen and I'm wondering what is this nonsense? Search and I find this on the Port of Seattle website:

Separately, because consumers are starting to look at sustainability in more ways than fisheries management, the Wild Alaska Pollock industry funded a study to determine what the carbon footprint of Wild Alaska Pollock actually is when compared to other proteins. The study, conducted by the world-renowned consultancy Quantis International, looked at several key impact categories such as global warming potential, energy use, use of land and water resources, and waste outputs. When the results were released, it showed that Wild Alaska Pollock is not only good for you, but good for the planet too!

The findings concluded that Wild Alaska Pollock fillet has an impact of 3.77 kg CO2-eq per kg of protein, significantly lower than comparative statistics reported for other protein sources.

• Wild Alaska Pollock: 3.77
• Chicken: 12.50
• Pork: 19.65
• Plant-Based meat: 20.83
• Beef: 115.75

I'm suspicious of anyone making disparaging remarks about cows, so I'm going to call it bullshit. However, lets see what diesel produces, because diesel is what fishing boat use for fuel, and they burn it in thousand gallon lots. Burning one gallon of diesel will produce 10 kilograms of CO2. Burning three pints of diesel will produce 3.77 kilograms of CO2. So fishermen are burning three pints of diesel for every kilogram of fish fillets they produce.

As for fish farting, the answer is mostly no, but some, like herring, do.