Something fishy
By Erika Zell, The Peak, The Independent Student Newspaper of Simon Fraser University, May 10, 2010
I've got a question for you: When did "farmed" salmon become a bad word? I was in line at my neighbourhood sushi shop, when the customer in front of me proudly proclaimed that she only ate wild salmon - and promptly walked out when the cashier (who barely spoke English and probably wasn't entirely sure what she was asking) meekly said he didn't know which type of salmon the restaurant used.
Farmed fish paranoia has swept the media and every day we come across studies trumpeting their new dangers. (They're full of PCBs! They carry sea lice!! They spread sea lice to wild salmon!! Dioxins, dieldrin, and toxaphene, oh my!!!) I don't doubt that there are serious problems with fish farms, but I do question whether or not they're any worse for the environment or our health than say, conventional dairy farms or genetically modified produce or grain products.
This whole controversy surrounding salmon farms just seems so counterintuitive to every other aspect of North America's collective eating habits. You say the farms are unethical in their treatment of the fish? A quick Google search will show you horrifically gruesome pictures of industrial slaughter houses. If there are high levels of chemicals recorded in the fatty tissues of farmed salmon, I'm sure it's got nothing on the processed food in your fridge already.
There's not nearly the same demand for free-range poultry or beef as there is for wild seafood, even though it's hardly news that conventionally reared cows and chickens have higher fat to muscle ratios than their free-range counterparts, and are often the result of relatively untested genetic experiments. So why are we fine with eating land animals that spent their entire lives in cages, but not fish? We realized long ago that we could not sustain our red meat or pork consumption by traditional hunting methods, so we started farming cattle and pigs; when will we figure out that it's the same situation with salmon?
Based on all the studies I could stomach, I concede that yes, there's some nasty baggage that comes along with farmed salmon at present, but it also seems that not all farmed fish is created equal. While farmed fish consumption and production has risen steadily in Europe, consumption has drastically decreased in North America, and North American production growth rates have also slowed over the past decade.
These stats can mean a lot of things. Northern European countries produce upwards of one third of the world's farmed fish stocks, and their industries are continuing to expand. Perhaps Europeans eat more farmed fish because it's more readily available, or perhaps European fisheries are more evolved and are eliminating the issues that continue to plague North American farms.
Either way, North Americans will soon be facing a problem. If we're eating less and less farmed fish but total salmon consumption is not decreasing, then we're eating more and more of an increasingly endangered species in the wild. Even the most ardent environmental eaters can be seen in line at the supermarket picking up their organic-fair-trade-no-GMO-ethically-caught-carbon-neutral wild salmon; but what's more unsustainable: industrializing and mass producing seafood, or eating an entire species into extinction? Either we consume less, a practice that the developed world as a whole isn't great at, or find alternatives. Given the Green Revolution and the exponential growth of food production over the last century, this last option seems to be our specialty, so let's jump on it.
My biggest fear is not that eating farmed salmon might have disastrous long-term health affects; no, I'm afraid that if this media frenzy doesn't die down soon, the market for farmed fish will collapse completely, thus eliminating the chance for innovations in the field that could potentially make farmed salmon a healthy, sustainable, and completely viable industry. If we keep badmouthing fish farms, what will it matter when we finally get it right? All the negative hype will be so firmly ingrained in society that no one will be willing to give new fish farms a try, and we won't have really gotten anywhere at all.
North Americans have to get over this paranoia we have over farmed salmon, or be prepared to give it up entirely. We've been hugely spoiled here in B.C. with the enormously diverse and abundant oceanic ecosystems in sight from our major cities, but fish are not an inexhaustible resource, and this is being proven to us time and time again as season after season, returning salmon stocks are consistently well below scientists' predictions. If it comes down to farmed salmon or no salmon at all, what will we choose?
Sadly, it seems we can't have our fish and eat them too, so we either have to fix the problems with the farms, or accept that we won't be meeting over sushi for much longer.
