Vox’s Future Perfect takes pride in being one of the top destinations in media for consistent, rigorous, ethically clear-eyed coverage of one of the biggest stories of our time — the mass production of billions of animals for food on factory farms.
But there’s arguably an even bigger, even more neglected story hidden within that one. Although humans raise and slaughter about 80 billion land animals every year, we use even more — orders of magnitude more — fish and other aquatic animals for food, with most estimates somewhere in the hundreds of billions or even trillions annually. And the way those animals make it to our plates is changing rapidly: As of 2022, most of the fish that humans eat are not caught wild from the ocean but raised on fish farms, which are so cruel they have been widely dubbed by animal welfare advocates as “underwater factory farms.”
But this is about more than just numbers. Consider that the way we catch and farm fish has enormous implications for the oceans that cover the vast majority of the Earth, and therefore for the future of life on Earth. And its influence will only continue to expand: Fish farming, also known as aquaculture, remains the fastest-growing agricultural sector globally.
So, this year, we decided to devote a project to the mysterious, secretive, under-covered world of fish and the humans who use them. We consider the evolving societal narratives that shape which animals are viewed as edible, valuable, or worthy of compassion — from humanity’s attempt to rapidly domesticate salmon (an animal that, in the wild, migrates along epic journeys of hundreds of miles) and confine them to cramped farms, to the captivating philosophical and ethical foundations of the debate over whether fish feel pain, to the case for taking shrimp seriously as moral subjects (yes, really).
Spanning text stories, podcasts, and video, Eating the Ocean represents some of our deepest coverage of fish and fish farming yet — and it might just challenge you to rethink everything you know about the misunderstood aquatic creatures that populate most of our planet. Check back for more stories in the coming months.
The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
—Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor, Future Perfect
- The case for caring about shrimp
- The surprisingly profound debate over whether fish feel pain
- What we’ve done to the salmon
- Should salmon farming be our future?
