World Tuna Day

Photo c/o chickenofthesea.com

May 2 is World Tuna Day.  What is the significance of this day and why are we celebrating this?  I love tuna, most especially the fresh ones although I'll have to settle for now with the canned ones.  But in my youthful days, we'd have fresh tuna almost everyday, sometimes newly caught from the sea or just off the fishing boat.

In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly designated today as the day to observe and highlight the significance and importance of sustainable management of tuna stocks in the oceans.  This is necessary in order for us to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  It had to be done because many countries are heavily dependent on tuna resources for their livelihood, employment, economic development, food security and nutrition, while the others are for recreational or game fishing.  And oftentimes, in man's haste to feed hungry mouths or to make money, the planet and the voiceless ones living in it are ignored or forgotten.

How do you eat your tuna?  Perhaps like many of you, your only exposure to this fish is either the canned tuna or the frozen ones in the supermarkets.  And you use it for your salad, to make tuna pasta, eat it straight from the can, and tuna spread sandwich.  As I said earlier on, I had the good fortune of having freshly caught tuna cooked in various ways: roasted, fried, steamed, with soup, and raw too.  I even got the experience of eating crackling tuna skin (the GenSan folks were saying it's their version of the chicharon).  And it was quite good too.

The tuna fishing industry is present in more than 80 countries all over the world, with thousands of fishing vessels operating in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean but especially still growing in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.  Unlike in my youth, when we had the wonderful opportunity to eat freshly caught tuna, most of the tuna production nowadays are either for the canned tuna market (light meat species i.e. skipjack and yellowfin) and for sashimi/sushi (fatty tuna i.e. bluefin, mostly exported to Japan).

In my research, I found this article by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that's quite informative, alarming, intriguing and with valid points on Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Tuna.  I'm beginning to have some second thoughts on the amount of canned tuna I'm consuming at the moment.  It's almost weekly that I eat at least 2-3 canned tuna and a couple of sashimi/sushis too.  But this will be another story.