Yesterday at Greenpeace UK, posted an item on tuna and sustainability and not surprisingly it fails to tell the whole story.

There is little argument over the fact that stocks of theiconic Bluefin tunaare not in good shape. But Americans don’t really eat bluefin, its something of an exotic fish. Per capita Americans eat about the weight of a few paperclips in Bluefin each year. Bluefin winds up in high end sushi bars, not the place most Americans trying to feed a family on a budget dine.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other tuna species that are in fine shape. As we pointed out in a letter to the editor that appeared recently in The Californian, skipjack tuna makes up nearly 70 percent of all the canned tuna eaten in the U.S. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s stock status for skipjack shows that the species is not being overfished in any ocean on earth. Meanwhile, even the Monterey Bay Aquarium admits that skipjack is a “resilient” species and that the majority of its populations are healthy and abundant.

While Greenpeace claims to want to educate consumers about which tuna is which, it continues to surreptitiously tie the admittedly sad situation with bluefin tuna to canned tuna. The fact is the tuna most Americans eat, or at least the ones I know, is far from facing a sustainability crisis.