ABSTRACT
Pescetarianism has roots that extend deep into history, though the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word “pescetarian” back only to 1991 and defines it as “A person who eats fish but avoids eating meat.” Little quantitative research exists on the number of pescetarians today. One piece of evidence that the trend is relatively significant comes from a mobile technology company that polled their users with dietary restrictions and found 2% self-identified as pescetarian. The Environmental Assessment Agency of the Netherlands produced a report on the consumption and production of meat, dairy, and fish in the European Union. They found that energy requirements for fish farming “are of the same order of magnitude as those of livestock farming,” and, in general, “farmed fish is more or less comparable to poultry in environmental impact.”.
