Abstract
AbstractEuropean aquaculture industry should be at the forefront of sustainable development, providing healthy and safe food of the highest quality to the consumer, through an environmentally sound approach. The purpose of this review was to explore in what way the current drive for sustainability has affected what the consumer perceives as quality in fish, specifically in gilthead seabream, one of the most important farmed species in the Mediterranean. It focuses on nutritional aspects such as fish meal and fish oil replacement, quality tailoring through finishing strategies, the influence of different farming systems and the effect of slaughter stress on seabream quality. In general, fish meal and fish oil replacement with vegetable ingredients will result in changes in the fatty acid profile of the fillets, and consequently the potential health benefits seabream offers to the consumer. While organoleptic properties suffer little change, the impact of these ingredients on welfare has not been fully investigated. Further studies are also needed to evaluate the effect of land animal ingredients on seabream quality. In either case, although finishing strategies to restore essential fatty acids are not completely effective, seabream can still retain a high nutritional value. Information on the use of dietary supplements as finishing strategies is still extremely scarce. Regarding fish welfare, the high densities practised in intensive production systems pose concerns which warrant further research in this area. Furthermore, new alternatives for common harvesting and slaughter methods are needed to improve welfare, as traditional methods are clearly stressful.
Highlights
The world population continues to growth exponentially, and the current growth cannot be sustained without a concomitant growth in the food supply
The per capita consumption of fishery and aquaculture products has been growing in parallel with the world population growth, and this increase is due solely to the increase in aquaculture production in the past decades, that went from 32.4 million tonnes in the year 2000 to around 66.6 in 2012, excluding aquatic plants (FAO 2014)
They are classically assessed using texture profile analysis or similar approaches that consist in measuring deformation behaviour as a function of applied pressure, in an attempt to directly replicate the dynamics of mastication (Mochizuki 2001)
Summary
The world population continues to growth exponentially, and the current growth cannot be sustained without a concomitant growth in the food supply. Reduction fisheries for the production of fish meal and fish oil could be used to feed people rather than farmed fish, as the demand for small pelagic fish for direct human consumption is likely to increase with the population growth (Naylor et al 2000). The question that arises from the changes we, as researchers and producers, are investigating and implementing in the aquaculture world, is whether – and if so, in what way – these new and improved practices affect what we, as consumers, perceive to be the quality of the final product: the fish. The purpose of this review is to discuss in what way the current drive for sustainability, with the changes it has brought about (or will bring) in the aquaculture sector, has affected what the consumer perceives as quality in fish, in gilthead seabream
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