I have a friend who used to be a purser for one of the big cruise lines. They had a leak which ruined a huge amount of carpet in a dining room. They carried spare carpet on board and replaced it... and then dumped the old carpet off the side of the ship.

These days it’s basically impossible to “ethically” eat anything, unless you have your own patch of land and can be bothered to grow vegetables.

Only if eating ethically is defined binary, not on a gradient.

A huge portion of harm can be reduced/prevented with only a little effort. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

> "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. "

Battle cry of the conservative party lately. This quote has its place but not in the context of this conversation.

It beats doing nothing. Vegetables are harder to avoid eating at all, but fish? You can totally do without eating any ever again and be fine. And almost all salt you can buy in stores has iode added so you won’t miss that nutrient.

There's no known dietary replacement for some essential nutrients that come from eating fish. Even fish oil pills aren't as effective.

Fish oil pills don’t solve the issue anyway, they’re made out of fish.

Be that as it may, by not eating fish you’re also not absorbing as much heavy metals which fish is rather rich in these days.

Not entirely true. Buy produce from your local organic farmer at the farmers market and you'll probably be fine ethically.

I find it strange that ships mix water runoff, antifreeze, hydraulic oil, engine oil seepage etc etc into a huge big mixed bilge tank and then try to separate it with an oil separator.

Strange.

It's more like the bilge is a central place where any fluid that leaks out of whatever system normally handles it winds up. On small vessels you just have a straight bilge pump that dumps out the side. At cruise ship scale you can afford to stick an oil/water separator filter on it.

Yes I can understand how it could end up like that, it’s just that I think there must be a better way by now.