If you pay even the slightest bit of attention to all of the issues swirling around seafood—the overfishing, the high mercury levels, the potential for GMO farmed salmon—staring down the fillets stacked up at the supermarket fish counter can be daunting. Not only is it unclear where those salmon steaks came from, but how can you determine how they were caught? Was that shrimp pulled up in a net from the open ocean, or was it raised in a small tank overflowing with antibiotics? What are the rules about cod again?
Even if you’re armed with a good seafood-buying app, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, that can involve a lot of flipping through your phone and reading just to pick up something for dinner. But rather than turn a blind eye to the issue, you could shop instead at a place that’s known to have good seafood practices. Thanks to Greenpeace’s latest Carting Away the Oceans study, the eighth version of its annual report, we can tell which supermarkets are doing right by our fishy friends. If you make your seafood purchases from one of these five chains, you probably won’t be doing too much damage to the oceans. The environmental group ranked retailers based on seafood-purchasing policies, conservation initiatives, labeling, transparency, and amount of Red List species stocked.
