It's hard to answer definitively without specifying: healthy for whom? Healthy for people, seems to be yes. Healthy for the oceans, seems to be kinda maybe. It's absolutely a better choice than orange roughy or shark! Here, in the third and final part, I consider the question: Healthy for the squid?

Well, duh. Definitely not. They're getting eaten.

I've been a vegetarian my whole life. I was raised that way, and as I got older, I continued to choose not to eat animals out of a combination of concern for the environment and love for the animals. But I'm no evangelical vegetarian. Many of my friends and relations, including most other squid biologists I know, will regularly chow down on calamari and other dead animals. They've made different choices, and I respect that.

Because I study squid, which includes sacrificing them for research, I've been sometimes understandably called upon to justify my decision not to eat them. To me, the end purposes are very different: gathering knowledge vs. human sustenance. It's pretty easy (especially in California) to sustain myself without dead animals, but it's pretty hard to gain basic biological information about a species without a few deaths. When I consider that such information is a tremendous aid to responsible management and conservation, and I end up being personally more comfortable sacrificing animals for science than for food.

That's me, and that's why I don't eat squid. It's not an argument, just an explanation.

But if I ever were to compromise my lifelong vegetarianism, it would have to be with respectful consumption of my advisor's Humboldt squid ceviche. That just seems right.