Do you remember the 1990s? The end of the Cold War? The creation of the European Union? The first Gulf War? The creation of the World Wide Web?

Maybe you don't - and maybe you've never heard of Mark Bittman, a food writer who wrote columns in the Washington Post on the joys of eating fish.

In 1994, the columns became a book "Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking." Even today, Amazon.com lists the book as the No. 2 seafood cookbook it carries, and the book logs in at a respectable 15,186th place for all books on the book sales website. Bittman has been the editor of Cooks Illustrated, writes food commentary for the New York Times, and has more cookbooks to his credit than you can shake a stick at.

And on Wednesday, he explained in the New York Times what happened when his publisher asked him to update his 1994 success for reissue.

But what does all that have to do with the price of fish, you might ask?

Well, back when the seal protests started, we managed to pretty much dismiss them as a flash in the pan, as an effort by ecological wingnuts with little clout and less-than-accurate information.

Well, the information may not have gotten any better, but the clout certainly has: between price, protesters and members of the European Parliament, the hunt can be legitimately considered to be on its last legs.

So, back to Bittman, fish, and relaunching a cookbook that revelled in the variety and wonder of fish recipes.

Here's what Bittman said in the New York Times on Wednesday: "Merely buying a piece of fish has become so challenging that when my publisher asked if I wanted to revise the book, I felt I had to decline. The cooking remains unchanged, but the buying has become a logistical and ethical nightmare. (Prices are no longer exactly friendly, either.)"

He talks about staying away from Atlantic cod and halibut because the fisheries are not ecologically sound, and about the need to be informed about where your seafood is coming from and how it's caught.

Or even of how it's not caught, as in the case of farmed fish: Bittman's leery of that, now, too.

"In fact, farm-raised fin fish are really the cage-raised chickens of the sea: in many instances wild fish are harvested to produce feed for farmed fish (nearly 90 per cent of the world's fish oil goes into fish food), and it takes three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon."

In the end, Bittman's personal position is pretty much a bellwether on where fish consumers could go: "It's improbable that I'll eat in a perfectly sustainable manner, even though I probably eat one-third as much fish as I did a few years ago. I'm trying not to let perfect become the enemy of good, and I'm trying to find a place that feels comfortable. That place is to see eating fish as a treat. I won't eat it daily or in huge quantities, but occasionally, with appreciation."

There's a message in there: fish producers and processors, almost across the board, need a measurable, recognizable certification program that can reassure customers that the fish they're eating will sit comfortably on their ecological conscience as well as in their stomachs.

Others are already moving quickly in that direction. And the time for us to be thinking about it is, at the very latest, right now.