A Fishy Tale
Good news for the discerning consumer; the US Department of Agriculture
(USDA) has this month issued guidelines requiring retailers to label the country of origin for beef, lamb, pork, fruit and vegetables and farmed and wild fish. At present the guidelines are voluntary but as of September 2004 they will become mandatory, and in the interim we have a six month public comment period 1 .
So what do you think? I’ll tell you what I think – fantastic, a good first step, what took so long? In particular it is about time someone took notice of the origins and difference between wild and farmed fish. This is a very important distinction as some pretty major changes have been taking place in the fishing world. Imported farmed Atlantic salmon from Chile, Canada,
Norway and Scotland has flooded the US market. Farmed Atlantic salmon is now the most common fresh salmon product on the seafood counter. As a result consumers do not know if they are making healthy and environmentally conscious choices. I am from the UK and it was only by coincidence that I found out what was happening in the salmon industry at home, as I also learnt that this is not an exclusively British trend but that massive changes in the global salmon industry are taking place. So this is my story, how I to came to discover what was going on and how I found a way to make better consumer decisions.
Back home, the changes first became apparent to me when salmon suddenly became available all year round and the price dropped significantly. It was great; I love salmon, now I could eat it regularly rather than just as a treat. I knew something dramatic must have happened in the salmon industry but I did not question what or why, I just enjoyed the salmon.
This was until I moved to Scotland, a major salmon producing country, when my blissful ignorance lifted and I came to realize what was going on.
I visited a picturesque west coast Scottish isle and instead of experiencing breathtaking wild landscapes with untouched mountains, lochs and beaches I was faced with a view dotted with what looked like floating tanks in the water. These I was told were fish farms. So this is where my new friend salmon was coming from and this is not just as a small Scottish

phenomenon, but a large global one. This is ‘industrial aquaculture’, factory farming for fish, and it’s in America too.
I thought that a new industry would be good for the economy, providing jobs and local income. The locals themselves on this idyllic Scottish isle seemed less convinced. Their traditional fishing livelihoods were being replaced by a heavily mechanized aquaculture industry being run by a handful of multinationals, largely based in Norway and Holland.
I am opposed to intensive factory farming of animals but these were fish, what does it matter if they are raised in cages like battery hens? Well,
Scotland was the start of my awakening. I came to realize how it did matter and why it is important that people come to realize the difference between farmed and wild salmon. The proposed labeling laws will make this easier but we need some additional facts about both wild and farmed salmon before making an informed consumer decision.
The fish farms themselves were causing problems too, on an environmental as well as an economic level. I did not want to believe it, how could something so good, my cheap salmon dinners, be causing any problems? I could see it for myself though; tones of pollution drifting out from these cages – fish feces, uneaten food and chemicals going straight into the sea.
Not a great tourist attraction. The locals were blaming this waste and the general ill health of the farmed salmon (in crowded cages disease and parasites proliferate) for the poisoning of their local shellfish fisheries .
Mussel grower after mussel grower was being shut down and although the scientists have not yet reached agreement, looking at the view and hearing the stories I could see how the residents drew their conclusions.
So I began to do a little research into this booming aquaculture industry, as in theory to me it seemed a good alternative to the world’s overfishing problems. I was wrong again. One simple fact proved me wrong – it takes three tones of fish taken from the sea (mackerel, sardines etc.) to make enough food (for salmon are carnivores) to feed one ton of farmed salmon.
Now I started wondering why nobody had told me about this intensive fish farming. Everyone knows about intensively farmed chickens, pigs and cattle seeing it as an unsustainable method of agriculture and I make my informed decision whether to buy these products or not. Did nobody know about the unsustainability of factory fish farming?

So I started asking questions and discovered that a friend of mine had worked in a factory processing farmed fish. She was very enthusiastic about my little investigation into fish farming as she also could not understand how the industry had gone unnoticed. She told me how she scraped millions of sea lice off the salmon (a big parasitic problem in farmed stocks) prior to processing whilst standing in a bucket of hot water to stop her extremities from freezing. She was 15 years old at the time. Living in an affluent country. I have since been informed that working conditions are far worse on fish farms and processing plants in countries such as Chile (a major importer to the US). I was shocked.
Her friend told tales of seal carcasses with pink spotted coats. Shot dead by fish farm workers to keep them away from the cages, pink spotted from eating the farmed salmon tainted with dye. Naturally the flesh of farmed salmon would be gray so they are given chemical dyes to achieve the pleasing pink hue that wild salmon naturally achieves and that we like so much and you see in seafood display cases.
My mother came to realize the difference between farmed and wild salmon when trying to make “gravlax” (salt and sugar cured salmon - a delicious
Swedish delicacy) as she found it impossible to cut the fine slices of salmon necessary for the dish. She was dealing with the mushy flesh of a lethargic caged salmon. As we all know, you need to exercise to develop muscle and for the energetic life of a wild salmon swimming in the ocean and then up rivers and waterfalls this is no problem. However, the plight of the endangered Atlantic salmon is somewhat different, now farmed and swimming with thousands of others in a small cage there is little hope for the body beautiful and no chance of developing firm flesh. For this reason farmed salmon also have a higher saturated fat content, as plentiful food and lack of exercise tends to give (e.g. farmed Atlantic salmon have 200 percent more saturated fat than wild pink or chum salmon) and the healthy Omega 3 fatty acid content of farmed salmon is significantly less than in wild salmon.
I must admit that even though I loved my salmon feasting days I had noticed a change in the texture of the fish, more liquid came out when cooking and the taste was somewhat lacking in comparison. However beyond aesthetics under the skin is a whole other story…
The intensive nature of aquaculture and the resulting outbreaks of disease and parasites has led farmers to give the salmon ‘medicine’ – antibiotics and

pesticides either taken in their food or sprayed directly into the cages. We in turn, eating our farmed salmon, are being given a dose, albeit smaller, of the same chemicals – dioxins and PCBs, which in humans can cause cancer, high blood pressure, and immune system and reproductive disorders. The antibiotics increase our risk of potentially reducing the efficacy of the antibiotics that we take. It is not a pleasant cocktail; this was the end of my brief relationship with farmed salmon.
So, farmed and wild salmon are two different products in both production method and quality; I am glad that the new labeling proposals recognize this.
Thankfully I still have a choice and even after my discoveries I can still eat salmon - wild salmon. Wild salmon has none of the negative environmental impacts associated with aquaculture, they do not contain colorants and although they do pick up trace chemicals from the environment these levels are significantly lower than those of farmed. Wild Alaskan salmon is sustainable as certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, the only problem being that it is seasonal, but for me it is worth the wait.
As consumers we have the right to know what is in a product, a right to know where it comes from and a right to the information required to make informed choices, therefore I embrace the new labeling proposals wholeheartedly. Our consumer choices will influence the future direction of the fishing industry; responsible informed choices make for a sustainable future.
By Larissa Lockwood
Industrial Aquaculture Campaign
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
For more information please
Please contact Larissa at llockwood@iatp.org
or phone 1-877-565-1287 or visit our website at www.iatp.org/fish
1
Submissions on the voluntary guidelines can be sent to William Sessions, Associate
Deputy Administrator, Livestock and Seed Program at: William.sessions@usda.gov