Where’s the beef? Not as much any more on most of our plates.

Many of us have cut back on eating red meat for health or philosophical reasons. This week, the first mad cow in Canada in ten years caused the stock market and the Canadian dollar to hiccup. Although there is no cause for panic, surely those out getting groceries this weekend have hesitated slightly longer than usual in front of meat displays and more often opted for chicken or fish.

In 1993, only a single cow in Red Deer was found to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This time, if a second cow in Fairview, Alberta starts wobbling, more people will be avoiding beef and eating more chicken and fish. Chicken feels like the lesser of two evils, so long as you don’t mind how battery hens are raised and the drugs they’re pumped up with.

Eating fish, even with all its nutrition and low fat, doesn’t seem like a good idea. Lately, the news points out that we have used up almost all the fish, dredged them up by the tonne from the ocean, kept the best and tossed the rest.

The Endangered Fish Alliance is a new group of chefs and restaurant owners working with the World Wildlife Fund. The chefs are worried that many commercial species of fish will go the way of the cod. They want cooks to stop cooking those fish and diners to stop ordering them. The fish that they’re worried about are swordfish, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and some kinds of caviar.

Can we stop eating fish? I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any of those fish on the Alliance’s list, but I’ve probably eaten a whole tuna myself, plus a number of salmon and a school of sardines. Every once in a while, I end up at Fries & Co. in Halifax for a big feed of fish and chips. I eat under the watchful eye of our Governor General; her picture hangs there, because she goes and eats there too whenever she can. I think I can stop eating fish. I know for sure that I can eat less fish.

Can we stop fishing? People who fish, or those who end up on the news, seem to feel the job of fishing is a sacred way of life, and not a question of supply and demand. The decline of the fisheries has happened over decades. The huge catches of 50 years ago are no more, yet fishermen burn the Canadian flag when they’re told they can’t fish.

They should spend their energies doing what farriers (people who shoed horses), file clerks and everybody else does to keep from going under in a huge wave of change in the job market: move on to something different âe¦ or at least tell their children to look elsewhere for their livelihood.

Ransom Myers, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie, is an overnight sensation this week, but his warnings about the decline of fish have been coming for years. He says that 90 per cent of the large predatory fish are in the process of disappearing. Many of them are gone already: cod, capelin, blue marlin, sailfish or flat fish.

It wasn’t the seals. We fished them out, took every one we could find, species after species. If we all end up surviving on what they eat in bad science fiction movies-pills and weird drinks, it’ll be our own fault.