🐙 When Abundance Isn’t Simple: The Octopus Question

The New York Times: Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’

 

There’s a moment in My Octopus Teacher when you stop thinking of the octopus as seafood.

You start seeing her as… someone.

Watching that documentary changed how I felt about ordering pulpo. Not because I’d become vegetarian, but because I’d learned something I couldn’t unlearn.

Octopuses are intelligent. They play. They problem-solve. They recognise individual humans. Some scientists now argue they’re sentient, capable of experiencing pain and pleasure in ways that matter morally.

So when I heard a recent episode of BBC’s The Food Programme about octopus populations booming in the waters around Brittany and the Channel Islands, I expected to feel one thing.

Instead, I felt three things pulling in different directions.

 

What’s happening in the water

As sea temperatures rise, conditions along the French Atlantic coast and around the Channel Islands have become more hospitable for octopus.

Numbers have increased. Significantly.

For some fishers, this is genuinely good news. Octopus fetches a decent price. It’s a new income stream in an industry where margins are tight and unpredictability is constant. In communities that have fished these waters for generations, any opportunity matters.

But here’s the complication.

Octopus are predators. They eat scallops. They eat crabs. They eat lobster.

The species that other fishers depend on.

So while one part of the fishing community benefits, another part watches their catch decline. Not because of overfishing, but because the ecosystem itself is shifting beneath them.

 

Three dimensions, no easy answer

This is where sustainable food gets interesting. And uncomfortable.

Because there isn’t one “right” answer here. There are at least three competing considerations, and they don’t resolve neatly.

1. Local livelihoods

We talk a lot about supporting local fishers. Buying seasonal. Reducing food miles. Eating what’s available rather than importing from halfway around the world.

By that logic, eating locally-caught octopus makes sense. It supports coastal communities. It diversifies what we eat. It reduces pressure on overfished species.

2. Ecological change

But why is octopus suddenly so abundant?

Because our oceans are warming. Because climate change is reshaping marine ecosystems in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

Eating what’s abundant sounds sustainable until you ask why it’s abundant. Are we adapting to ecological disruption, or just benefiting from it without questioning what it means?

And what happens to the species being displaced? The scallops, the crustaceans, the fishers who depend on them?

3. Animal sentience

Then there’s the octopus herself.

Research increasingly suggests that octopuses experience the world in complex ways. They’re not automatons responding to stimuli. They appear to have preferences, curiosity, possibly even something like emotion.

Does that change the ethics of eating them?

For some people, yes. For others, no more than eating pork or beef. But it’s a question worth sitting with, especially as our understanding of animal cognition evolves.

 

What this means for sustainable food

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. And I think that’s the point.

Sustainable food is often presented as a checklist. Eat this. Avoid that. Look for this label.

But the octopus question shows why that framing falls short.

Real sustainability requires us to hold multiple truths at once:

• That local and seasonal matter, but context matters more
• That abundance isn’t automatically good, especially when it signals ecological disruption
• That our understanding of animals is changing, and our ethics might need to change with it

The clients I work with face questions like this all the time. Not always about octopus, but about trade-offs that don’t resolve cleanly.

There’s rarely a perfect answer. But there’s always a more informed answer, one that acknowledges complexity instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

 

Join the conversation

This is exactly the kind of topic we dig into at our monthly meetups.

Not to find the “right” answer, but to get better at asking better questions.

If that sounds like your kind of conversation, join us at the next one.

 

🎧 Listen: Eating Octopus – BBC’s The Food Programme

What do you think – would you eat octopus because it’s abundant?

Beyond the Catch: Rethinking How We Source Seafood