endofthelineLast week I attended a screening for the documentary The End of the Line, a film to be released later this year that details how overfishing is essentially eradicating every single species of fish from the ocean.

Held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle, it included seafood hors d’oeurves (all sustainable, of course) like smoked salmon, oysters and geoduck ceviche. The food was fine, but the movie was what left an impact.

If fishing continues at the same pace, scientists predict there will be basically no fish left in the sea by 2048.

2048. That’s well within my lifetime and that of almost everyone I know.

We’ve blogged before about the film Food, Inc. and how jarring that was. But this film was even more upsetting. Maybe it was because it taught me so much I didn’t know. Like that bluefin tuna are being overfished so far beyond the suggested quota that they are on the verge of extinction — yet restaurants like Nobu continue to serve it on their menus, the equivalent of selling orangutang or white rhino. Or that unagi, or eel, one of my favorite dishes to order at sushi restaurants, is 95 percent extinct.

It was shocking, and it made me wonder what I can do to avoid being part of the problem. Like in Food, Inc., the film recommends letting money talk – buying sustainable seafood and asking your fish provider where the fish came from and how it was caught. I also picked up a fish guide that lists what the best, okay, and worst options are for buying and eating seafood. Sustainable Sushi is another great resource. And it turns out that local organic grocery chain PCC is one of the best places in the country to buy fish you know is sustainable.

It’s a good thing we like anchovies, because along with sardines and mackerel, those are some of the best fish you can eat: low on the food chain, full of Omega-3s, and abundant. They’re also cheap, which shows that eating sustainable seafood doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive at all.

So the good news is that there’s reason to be optimistic, if people are aware about the issues of eating a lot of seafood out there. I would like to still be eating salmon 40 years from now. Wouldn’t you?