November 14th

Deep-Sixing the Fishies

I have long had two factors in the system that I have now decided to dump: Fish Stocks and Seafood. The purpose of these two was, first, to demonstrate that seafood comprises an insignificant component of the overall human diet. Yeah, sure, we harvest 25 million tons of seafood every year, but that really isn’t so much. 25 million tons is 50 billion pounds; divide by 7 billion people and you get 7 pounds of seafood per person per year. That might be enough to live on for a few days. Seafood comprises less than 1% of the overall human diet and so it really is not significant to larger issues of malnutrition. 

The second point I wanted to make concerned the depletion of our fisheries. Humanity is overfishing the oceans and many of the important species are being driven to the verge of extinction. I felt that this was a situation that students should be familiarized with.

However, not only is seafood pretty much irrelevant to the larger issues of human survival: there’s nothing that the player can do about the depletion of the fisheries. It might be possible to include a tax on seafood into the game, but it would have very little financial benefits and very few consequences of any other kind. It’s just a distraction from the larger issues – and the game is already too complicated for most people. 

Therefore, the fishies are getting the heave-ho. Bye-bye, fishies!