The afternoon that I spoke to Henry Lovejoy, president of the sustainable-seafood purveyor EcoFish, both of us, separately, had eaten tuna for lunch: canned albacore caught in the Pacific Ocean. Same species, same ocean, but Lovejoy’s lunch was environmentally benign. Mine, I’m embarrassed to say, was an ecological disaster.

The difference was that Lovejoy’s tuna salad was made from albacore caught by a boat trolling off Southern California. Mine came from Thailand, and it was caught in tropical waters on a long line that drifted across miles of ocean, trailing hundreds of baited hooks, killing not only the tuna that became my lunch, but endangered sea turtles, sharks, pelagic birds, and dozens of other aquatic species—all dumped dead back into the water as bycatch.

Our lunches were a fitting prelude to the conversation that followed. I wanted simple, straightforward advice on how to navigate all the labels and the buzzwords so that I could choose seafood that was both eco-friendly and good for me. I also had questions that even the excellent guides published by Seafood Watch and Environmental Defense couldn’t answer. I figured that Lovejoy, with roughly two decades of experience in the seafood industry, could provide some expert guidance. Here’s his take on the major issues.

—Barry Estabrook

Farmed or Wild?

“There’s no black-and-white response to that question,” Lovejoy says. “There are good [seafood] farms and good wild fisheries; there are bad farms and bad wild fisheries.” So these labels don’t tell you anything unless you know the species (and when you throw the word organic into the mix, it gets even trickier). A few helpful rules:

American catfish, trout, and tilapia: Farmed is an excellent choice for these species. Tilapia—which have come out of nowhere to become one of the five most-consumed fish in the country recently—are vegetarians, so they don’t require a diet of “feeder” fish the way carnivores do and are therefore a very sustainable choice. “To avoid chemical contamination, I would choose fish farmed in the United States and steer away from ones raised in China,” Lovejoy says; Central American tilapia is also a safer bet than Asian.

Crabs: Recently the population of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has plummeted. Are any other crab species okay to eat? “Oregon and Washington Dungeness,” says Lovejoy. “You can’t go wrong. There are a lot available, and it’s probably the model crab fishery for the world. And they’re delicious.”

Lobster: “Maine lobsters are a good choice,” says Lovejoy, who started out in the lobster business. “I see that the Marine Stewardship Council is assessing the Maine fishery for certification. If it gets MSC certification, which is likely, lobster will become a great choice.” Is the Marine Stewardship Council’s blessing really all that it’s cracked up to be? “There’s no better organization out there than the MSC. If you see the MSC label, you know it’s sustainable,” Lovejoy says.

Salmon: Avoid farmed varieties—even the “organic” kind, since that label, when applied to farmed salmon, “doesn’t mean a whole lot of anything,” says Lovejoy. (There are no USDA standards for seafood to date.) Go for wild Alaskan salmon instead.

Scallops: Farmed is the best way to go here. Wild scallops are traditionally harvested by dredging the sea floor, which causes environmental damage, so “they are best avoided,” Lovejoy says. “And you should buy scallops labeled ‘dry’—otherwise they’ve been treated with sodium tripolyphosphate. The industry claims that it’s a preservative, but the real reason it’s used is that it causes the meaty tissue to absorb up to 50 percent of its weight in water. It’s the biggest case of consumer fraud in the seafood industry.”