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Problems With Seafood Go Beyond Overfishing, Says 'American Catch' Author

Clerks prepare the fish selling department at Whole Foods Market in New York City.  (Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)
Clerks prepare the fish selling department at Whole Foods Market in New York City. (Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)

Issues of overfishing and the depletion of fish stocks are often in the news, but according to author Paul Greenberg, consumers should be also be concerned with where the fish is coming from.

It’s a conflict Greenberg explores in his 2014 book “ American Catch: The Fight For Our Local Seafood,” which is being released in paperback today. As Greenberg told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson, the decline in eating local seafood has caused a decline in water quality.

“We’ve abandoned a lot of waterways as food systems and instead we’ve turned them kind of into waste disposal systems,” he said. Because “we can rely on things like cheap Asian shrimp to supply something that you know our estuaries should be supplying here at home.”

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