McPollock

McDonald's signaled this week that its Filet-O-Fish boxes will sport the Marine Stewardship Council's blue ecolabel.

McDonald's uses Alaska pollock for its popular fish sandwich, and the MSC certifies Alaska's pollock fisheries as sustainable.

McDonald's has produced a glossy video featuring Dutch Harbor, the trawl vessel Defender and skipper Kenny Longaker. Go here and click on fish.

Another pollock-based product, Fish McBites, reportedly is slated for national release.

If the fast-food titan really insists on MSC-blessed fish, it soon might have a choice of suppliers. Producers in Russian waters including the Sea of Okhotsk and the western Bering Sea are closing in on certification.

omg!

I don't think this is new in some parts of the world, but I see here in Anchorage that McDonald's is now offering a double Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

Hmmm. If this catches on, will we have to, like, double our harvest of Alaska pollock?

A New York Times fish mystery

Works with hoki or pollock. Wesley Loy photo

Here's a curious New York Times story that aspires to solve the "eternal mystery" of what goes into a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich but ultimately leaves readers seriously uniformed.

The gist of the story is about the purported overfishing of hoki off New Zealand.

Hoki is a whitefish used in the Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

Because the catch limit has dropped from 275,000 tons in 2000 to 100,000 tons last year, well, we might run short of fish sandwiches, the Times story implies.

What struck me most about the article was the lack of any mention of probably the main fish used in the Filet-O-Fish sandwich — Alaska pollock.

As with hoki, the pollock catch limit has trended down sharply in recent years. But the eastern Bering Sea continues to yield immense catches of pollock, about eight times the hoki volume cited in the Times story.

You'd think the Times wouldn't have let that fish, uh, fact get away.