Plenty of seafood is farmed. The majority of shrimp for instance comes from farms.

Ocean fish farming is more a conversion process than a production process. Most of the feed is wild catch fish.

but does this apply blanket-like to all farmed seafood, or is it mostly about fish?

E.g. I would expect shrimp, mussels, clams to not be fed processed wild catch, unlike salmon.

Something like 3lbs of wild caught fish as feed to produce 1lb of farmed salmon.

100 Grams of shrimp has a carbon footprint of 198kg(436lb)

https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footp...

The numbers cited in there don't make sense. Something has to have been garbled from the original research report. The article says:

The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for 13.4 square kilometers (five square miles) of mangrove

But Asian shrimp farms produce over a million tons of shrimp per year:

http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolde...

If it takes 13.4 square kilometers of mangrove per kilogram of shrimp, Asian shrimp farms would occupy more than

13.4 * 1000 * 1000000 = 13,400,000,000

(13.4 billion) square kilometers of mangrove. That's about 26 times the surface area of Earth.

Most shrimp farming uses a lot of antibiotics and destroys mangroves

I've been wondering lately if cutting out a product is less ethical than buying the ethical version and supporting that market. Relatedly, people often don't eat meat because they oppose unethical treatment of animals. But I imagine farmers who treat animals well are disadvantaged by that strategy- people who care enough to buy their more expensive product opt out of the market entirely.

I really do think people want ethical food products, but with food in particular, it's really a lot to ask of individual consumers. There's a reason we have so many regulations around food quality - it just makes all our lives easier.

I've always thought less-than-ethical food products should be taxed more heavily, and the money should be used to subsidize the more ethical, healthier alternatives. Outright bans on certain product classes can be tremendously distortionary and have unintended side effects, but it's hard to imagine little pigouvian nudges being anything but beneficial to society.

I would be very much in support of a regulation that requires every single product to display the carbon footprint required to produce it and, where applicable, the carbon footprint of using the thing per year.

Doesn't necessarily solve our problem here, but it might help the larger situation and with potentially bipartisan support (economic right positions rely on the consumer being able to make educated choices).

I absolutely agree with a carbon tax and a land tax to push the prices in the right direction. From what I recall, American meat is subsidized by the government, making it cheaper than anywhere else. I expect removing those subsidies would also have the support of anyone not bribed by the meat industry.

All too often, controversial opinions dominate the conversation because they get people talking. I think there's a lot we can do to improve things by working together across political lines.

> I imagine farmers who treat animals well

This is a cherry picked argument, at least in the US, where "factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle" [1].

Besides, even in this ideal farm where the farmer treats the animals perfectly and lets them live long, fulfilling lives, they're still killing the animal at the end of the day. Hard to see how that is "treating [it] well".

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...

I don't think 'cherry-picked' is the right descriptor. My point is that in order for those percentages to change, we need to seek out ethical farming and pay for it.

If you believe that it is unethical to raise livestock with fulfilling lives and then kill them for meat, by all means do not eat meat. I disagree, but I accept that as a valid, reasonable position to hold. I think most people are more concerned with animal cruelty specifically, and also have a lot of difficulty switching to vegetarianism.

If you're picky about the fish you eat, there are some very sustainable choices.

In a happy coincidence, some of the healthiest fish are also some of the most sustainable fish.