This interview with Taras Grescoe about his book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood got me thinking. In the interview, Grescoe gets into some detail about which fishes you should avoid and which you should seek if you want to support sustainable fishing practices. This information isn't entirely new to me, as I've spent some time browsing the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch website in the past, but I admit that I rarely keep these considerations in mind when I'm at the seafood counter or at a restaurant. (I've been pretty good in avoiding swordfish and Chilean sea bass, but salmon and shrimp are hard to resist.)

I'm also in the midst of reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, so recently I've been overwhelmed with information about sustainable and ethical living. It seems to me that there's no way even an informed and conscious eater could manage to weigh and measure all the various consequences of their daily routines without resorting to a life of ascetism or obsession, and even then the inevitable unpredictability of this complex world is likely to lead you to misinformed behavior.

So what kinds of decisions should a concerned individual make to best support sustainable living? Is it more important to eat locally, eat the right seafood, cut down beef consumption, or something else? The answer of course depends on what issues are subjectively more important to you.

Ideally, I'd have access to a reliable tool where I could go and add moral weights to a slate of issues: energy independence, pollution, biodiversity, animal cruelty, human rights, etc. The tool would then display a ranked list of lifestyle changes that would best further your moral goals, so that you could, e.g., choose to focus more of your efforts on cutting your beef consumption than avoiding farmed shrimp. Such a tool would be even more useful if it could also be relevant for the average suburban American -- e.g., what are the best fast food restaurants to patronize, or the best dishes at Applebee's?

This tool certainly would have to be built upon expert opinion to determine how the weighted issues relate to each lifestyle change, and even then there's still no way to avoid some level of arbitrariness and uncertainty. But, if possible, it would be good to have some knowledgeable filter on ethical living that doesn't solely rely on television newsmagazines, government regulation, or market forces.

In truth, I wouldn't expect that such a tool would be accurate and effective in practice due to the sheer complexity of the world, but I'd like to try one anyway out of curiosity. It'd be like one of those candidate picker websites. Anyone have a link?