Just Say No...

...to farmed salmon.

If you've ever tasted the wild variety you'll know the flavor is vastly superior but what isn't obvious are the negative environmental effects caused by raising salmon in a pen and feeding them antibiotics, chicken byproducts and food coloring to make the flesh orange.

From Gourmet...

Today, one third of the aquaculture industry is controlled by two huge multinational corporations, Fjord Cermaq and Nutreco.

In the back of the boat, I noticed a sack of Corey Marine Feeds Salmon Grower labeled “pigmented.” One of Sprague’s associates explained that salmon fed a nonpigmented diet have whitish-gray meat. Synthetic carotenoids must be added to the food so their flesh turns the requisite shade of orange. Wild salmon get their color from krill and other small organisms in their natural diet. I scooped out a handful of Salmon Grower. It looked and smelled like the premium kibble I feed my cats.

The environmental effects of a salmon farm can extend far beyond the patch of seabed directly beneath it. For every pound that a salmon in a net pen gains, it devours commercial feed processed from two to five pounds of small open-ocean fish like anchovetta, herring, and jack mackerel. Put another way, salmon farming takes far more fish protein from the wild than it produces.

As incredible as it sounds, to satisfy the appetites of the salmon in a one-acre farm, processors vacuum nearly everything bigger than a guppy from 40,000 to 50,000 acres of ocean. It’s no surprise that stocks of these oily little fish are now fully exploited worldwide, leaving the aquaculture industry scrambling to formulate substitutes for fish meal and oil. Slaughterhouse by-products like bonemeal and blood meal, and feather meal (made from waste at chicken-processing plants), have been introduced into fish chow.

If Gourmet didn't convince you maybe a study funded by the Pew Charitable Trust will...

In the most comprehensive analysis of farmed and wild salmon to date, researchers analyzed toxic contaminants in approximately 700 farmed and wild salmon collected from around the world to be representative of the salmon typically available to consumers. The study, which was sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, examined salmon produced in eight major farmed salmon producing regions and obtained from retail outlets in 16 major North American and European cities.

The study found that concentrations of several contaminants associated with serious health risks from neurological effects to cancer are significantly higher in farmed salmon than in wild salmon.

The authors concluded that concentrations of several cancer-causing substances are high enough to suggest that consumers should consider restricting their consumption of farmed salmon. In most cases, consumption of more than one meal of farmed salmon per month could pose unacceptable cancer risks according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) methods for calculating fish consumption advisories.