Alaskan salmon: Product of China
Protesting the Protesers, July 9, 2012
The package of salmon burgers sure looks appealing. I came across one similar during my last visit to Costco.
Front and centre is a delicious-looking burger, with lots of eco-labels on it to make us feel better about what we’re buying (for more info on eco-lables visit our posting on the subject: The Gospel of Seafood). If we’re lucky the package will have an old-timey picture of a fishing boat on it somewhere, or perhaps a white-bearded grizzled smiling man in a rainslicker. Yellow, of course.
The package goes out of its way to make sure we know that it is made from “ALASKAN” salmon, even mentioning it twice with the added notation that it is also “WILD.” It’s very well presented, and inside the package is a delicious and wholesome product, no doubt about that part.
But there’s some context missing.
These salmon burgers have travelled an awfully long way.
For some of our readers, Alaska is a long way away, but we’re talking even farther.
These burgers come from fish which are so well-travelled they should carry passports.
These burgers come from fish which were caught in Alaska and frozen at sea. The fish (packaged as head-on, gutted whole fish) were then shipped to a factory in China.
There, the fish were thawed, and cut into fillets. Chinese workers pulled out the pin bones by hand from the thawed fillets. The fillets were turned into salmon burgers, then re-frozen and repackaged.
They were then put in a box and sent all the way back across the Pacific Ocean to the USA and Canada to our grocery stores.
Read the full blog at: http://protestingtheprotesters.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/alaskan-salmon-product-of-china/
