Seatopia - Delicious, Healthy, and Sustainable Seafood

Hi friends! I hope you're having a great 2022 so far. Today, I am thrilled to share with you a company that I am very excited about: Seatopia.

Summary: Seatopia is a farm-to-table seafood company that works with sustainable farms to provide delicious, healthy, and sustainable seafood. I have no affiliation with them; I just think that their fish is incredible and provides a sorely needed option besides wild-caught and commodity-farmed fish.

Full post: Many of us are aware of the potential health benefits of moderate fish consumption, such as its high content of Omega-3 fatty acids. Indeed, a JAMA article that examined the associations between diet and longevity in more than 70,000 people found that those following a pescatarian diet had the lowest mortality rates. (I'll talk more extensively about diet in a later post)

The problem, sadly, is that our seas are becoming increasingly more polluted. This is bad news for many reasons, including world climate as well as our own health -- many wild-caught fish now contain moderate-to-high levels of toxic heavy metals, most notably, mercury. This is most pronounced in larger fish, such as tuna, halibut and swordfish.

Of course, an alternative to wild-caught fish is farmed-raised. Unfortunately, most commercial fish farms are not only environmentally damaging, but they feed the fish a diet that is substantially different from what they eat naturally. As a consequence, they yield fish that is far less nutritious and healthy for us.

In sum, it is nearly impossible to eat fish these days without making compromising your own health, the environment, or most likely, both (one option is to stick to sustainably caught small fish like sardines and mackerel, but they don't quite satisfy the way other seafood does). The negative consequences of fish consumption have been covered in high-profile documentaries, such as Seaspiracy.

This is why I was so thrilled to come across Seatopia, which offers an alternative to the largely broken models of wild-caught and commodity farmed fishing. They have meticulously searched for and identified a number of small 'artisan' fish farms that produce incredibly high quality, healthy seafood, in an environmentally sustainable way. From their website:

"Connecting the members of our Collective directly with regenerative farms raising real fish breed from non-GMO eggs, responsibly fed and conscientiously raised in low-density, and antibiotic-free environments, Seatopia is the first farm-to-table seafood cooperative! Only working with the “best-of-the-best” truly sustainable aquaculture farms, our direct farm-to-table seafood supply chain values and incentivizes artisan quality production, fair labor practices, and environmental stewardship... thus we can proactively and quantifiably mitigate pressure on the ocean's overfished wild stock populations while directly monitoring feed inputs to produce clean, consistent and quantifiably safe seafood."

They meticulously test their seafood to ensure that it falls well within safe levels of toxins, including mercury. And, perhaps most importantly, their fish is incredible. I've never had such soft, melt-in-your-mouth, delicious seafood. It's also blast frozen / sushi grade, so that you eat it raw, right out of the (compostable) package, if you desire. Me, I briefly sear it in tea seed oil, which has a high smoke point and a delicate taste that I find goes very well with seafood.

Of course, such high quality and sustainable food does come at a price. Depending on the subscription package that you get, 6 oz pieces of fish will cost between $11 and $15 each. But in my opinion, food that scores so high on all 3 dimensions - taste, nutrition, and sustainability - is well worth it. I personally get the 24-serving box (the largest), because it is the cheapest per pound and it's easy to skip a month if you need to.

I reached out to them and they actually provided me with a discount code you can use, GAVIN15. I don't get any benefits from you using it, I just want to spread the cheer!

Let me know if you try Seatopia and love it as much as I do! To your health,

Gavin