Eating the Ocean

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 wid