a heads up to our human friends who encourage healthy and thoughtful eating!

we are fish, and naturally we eat fish, because fish are cannibals.  we don’t mean to shock you, but it is just a fact.  deal with it.

now, we have been reading some wonderful tumblrs by some lovely human persons who are deeply interested in healthy eating and exercise!  we think this is great.  if there is anything that may indeed fix the food chain, it will be more than just desire and marketing— it will be thought and care.  this will not only fix the food chain, which is terribly fucked up, but it will help to fix the planet, which we share with you!  therefore kudos to you, human friends, who are working on these ideas!

we want to tell you some things you will probably not like to hear.  first, tuna.  it is good for you and it is delicious.  it is also endangered, whether any human agency out there has the guts to admit this or not.  why?  partly because of bad fishing practices, such as overfishing, and fishing at the wrong times.  but also because you seem to think you can put tuna in everything.  in cans, in cat food.  hello, WE ARE ENDANGERED, and yet there you are, advertising cat food using us?  this is wrong.  stop it.

if you want to eat tuna thoughtfully, for your health, we encourage you to make a treat of it, eat it fresh (not from cans), and to start thinking about how you will explain to your offspring that your generation ate as much of us as you could catch and then destroyed the rest with pollution.  you might also want to consider explaining that your actions (we’re looking at you, japan) have literally destroyed entire countries (*cough!* somalia!), all for the sake of eating cheap sushi five times a week.  or you can start to make some useful noise to your governments and businesses and media, and see if you can’t fix it before we go extinct.  we’d appreciate it.

second, salmon.  specifically wild salmon.  the problem is, there’s no way of telling if a salmon marked “wild” is actually wild.  many of us were released from hatcheries into the sea, where, if we are caught, we are labled wild, when really we are not.  hey, we’re doing our best here, and given one species (yours) has managed to reduce our numbers by something like ninety percent in less than fifty years, we’re the shizzit, awright?  but we can only do so much to compensate for your actions.  and the fact is, most of us are not “wild”.  so running around trying to find wild salmon is not going to work for you.  it just won’t.  we would suggest you human persons who care about such things make more useful noises to your governments and businesses and media, and see if you can’t fix that one too.

we’d like to be wild, and plentiful, and for all of you to enjoy us as much as we enjoy ourselves.  but you seem to be bound and determined to look at us as mere products.  if you do that, you will not get healthy, because health is an integrated system.  your own personal body, your community, your land, your oceans, your rivers, your planet.  it is all one and the same.  having a checklist of healthy food is nice, but it will not alter the fact that you can shop the world over and not be able to tell if a salmon is wild caught.  just because it’s on the lable doesn’t make it so.  in fact, you could go fishing and catch one of us, and you still won’t be able to tell.  that’s how messed up you’ve managed to make things.

we are not telling you to not eat us.  that would be hypocritical.  but you need to get right with the oceans and rivers, in the same way you feel you need to get right with your bodies.  everything is everything is one is one is one.  remember that.  we are on your side!