Fish ingredients in online recipes do not promote the sustainable use of vulnerable taxa

Abstract

Consumer preferences can be influenced by cultural factors, such as recipes. Thus, popular recipes using seafood ingredients could encourage demand for the featured marine species. We recorded the fish taxa appearing in all online Greek recipes and related the number of recipes in which a taxon is a suggested ingredient to the taxon's landings and vulnerability to fishing. For marine fish, the number of recipes per taxon (henceforth called recipe prevalence) increased significantly with the taxon's landings. When the effect of landings was removed, recipe prevalence increased significantly with vulnerability to fishing, indicating that more vulnerable taxa appear more frequently in recipes. This pattern should be reversed by eliminating the recipe abundance of taxa that are very vulnerable to fishing and counterbalance such a reduction with an increase in the representation of taxa of low vulnerability, landed in large quantities and currently underrepresented in recipes. Managing recipe composition by educating a small group of stakeholders (i.e. chefs and recipe authors) may be a cost-effective way of promoting fisheries sustainability when compared to directly educating consumers. © 2012 Inter-Research.