There’s also the fact that global consumption of fish has doubled since 1973, for both wild and farmed fish, and that 90% of this increase has come about in developing countries. (That surprised me. American per capita fish consumption, on the other hand, hasn’t changed much. It's actually due to a bit of good news—their income has gone up, on average, so they can afford to buy more protein for their diets.)

Wild cod, shark, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and bluefin tuna are seriously threatened. According to the UN’s report, “the maximum wild-capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.” This is partially due to fishing, but mostly due, ironically, to fish farming. According to Bittman, nearly one-third of the world’s wild fish are fed to farmed fish, as well as pigs and cows. This is a shockingly stupid thing to do, given that producing one kilo of farmed salmon requires three kilos of wild fish (the ratios for cod and tuna are 5:1 and a blinding 20:1, respectively). Bittman recommends we acquire a taste for mackerel, anchovies, herring and sardines.

He distinguishes between decent fish farming (“small in scale, focuses on herbivorous fish and is not only sustainable but environmentally sound”) and industrial fish farming (where $1 billion per year is spent on medicine, land gets degraded, water gets polluted, and wild populations are infected with the diseases and breeding characteristics of farmed fish), and states the obvious, too: farmed fish hardly ever taste as good as their wild cousins.

Apparently, though, we can still save ourselves—and the fish in the sea. One strategy is “catch shares,” giving fisherman shares (that they can buy and sell) in a certain fixed-quota fishery, in other words turning them into stakeholders with incentives not to trash the sea (more on this here). It’s worked in the places (Australia, New Zealand, America) where the scheme has been piloted, but it’s far from universal. Still, it seems like the best hope.

That, and eating more sardines.