If you’re a loyal listener of Fake Doctors, Real Friends, you’ve heard Zach Braff and Donald Faison talk about the explosive Netflix documentary Seaspiracy and how it inspired them to stop eating fish. On this episode, they sit down with director Ali Tabrizi to hear about the making of the documentary, the revelations he uncovered about the fishing industry, his plans for the future (“Donald and I are available for hire,” Zach tells him), and address some of the criticisms about the film – and most importantly, why in the world he didn’t name it Conspirasea – It was right there! Ali is “so glad you asked,” explaining that they named it to follow a 2014 documentary called Cowspiracy – but he loves that the pun-that-wasn’t went viral “because it gave a lot of comedians a chance to talk about it,” he laughs.
Ali started making the movie when he was 22, saying he got interested in finding out what’s wrong with the ocean when he saw a whale wash up on a beach in the UK, and autopsies showed that the whale had ingested a considerable amount of plastic. His intention was to uncover the truth about plastic, but what he discovered was much more disturbing. And as viewers of the documentary can attest, many of the people he interviewed for the film didn’t even realize how big of a problem overfishing really was. He explains “by-catch,” the term for what fishermen catch that they aren’t intending to sell as food; over 300,000 dolphins and whales, and possibly many more than that, die in nets intended for other fish, and are discarded to sink to the bottom of the ocean or wash up on our shores. Essentially he discovered that “there’s no such thing as ‘dolphin-safe’ seafood,” because so many perish in the by-catch. And while we’re worried about plastic straws, thousands more sea turtles are dying through by-catch as well.
He also found that the “sustainable” and “dolphin-safe” labels we rely on in the grocery stores to make sure we’re purchasing cruelty-free food are little more than paid promotions; the organizations who apply those labels are paid heavily by the fishing industry to affix their labels onto their products. The same organizations often pay marine scientists to cover up or gloss over the detrimental effects of industrial fishing on our oceans. Ali also uncovered evidence of slave labor and human rights violations, explaining that their trip to Thailand was meant to be several weeks long but they left after only two days because their interpreter would have been “hunted down” for translating for them. Plus, the “fresh fish” in your high-end supermarket might be decades old and that lovely pink salmon is likely dyed that color; find out all about the issues with our oceans, and most importantly, what you can do about it, on this episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends.
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