Where Have All the Salmon Gone?

"If we are going to continue to eat wild salmon, we must eat them sparingly as the rarest of delicacies and their price should reflect their rarity in the world."

--from Four Fishes (Greenberg 67)

Farm-raised vs. wild-caught, that is the question. In an effort to educate myself on one of my favorite foods, I started reading Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg. Greenberg begins with salmon. Since starting his book, I've come across a 2010 National Geographic article, "Alaska's Choice: Salmon or Gold?" and another online from National Geographic in 2009 titled "Kamchatka Salmon: Where the Salmon Rule." Neither makes me feel better about our Salmon supply; however, finding the Wild Salmon Center online and seeing what they're doing to protect salmon habitat makes me slightly more hopeful. Be sure to watch the video clip below from the WSC site.

But back from my ramblings.

I could find little information on the internet for salmon consumption around the world, but I did find some figures from SeafoodSource.com for three countries, which may provide some perspective on just how many people consume salmon (there was no way to differentiate between wild-caught and farm-raised salmon in the information I found). According to different articles on the site above for 2010, 6.1 million Brits consumed fresh salmon, China was the second largest export market for Alaskan salmon (followed closely by Japan), and the US imported 200 million pounds of Atlantic Salmon in the first six months of 2010. That doesn't take into account the native peoples in Alaska and Russia--and probably many other places as well--whose diets depend on what they can catch.

With the decline of wild salmon populations because of habitat destruction, over-fishing, and poaching, it isn't difficult to understand why salmon has become a farm-raised product. The debate over which is better rages on. From a consumer's perspective, farm-raised salmon has less appeal to me because the color is often added and the flavor does not compare to wild-caught. Throw in my view that farmed salmon is also bad for the environment, and I will by-pass farm-raised fish every time. An added concern for me is that salmon is on the road to becoming a genetically engineered, farm-raised product if the USDA approves (the product in question is called AquAdvantage Salmon by AquaBounty Technologies, see Greenberg, pg. 65-66). You can also read an MSNBC report about it and cast your vote for or against this or a similar product here.

Greenberg mentions previous reports about farmed salmon infecting wild salmon with sea lice, further decimating their numbers. I ran across two reports that dispute this claim, one from Science Daily in January 2011 and the other from The National Academy of Sciences in November 2010. Pollution from fish feces and uneaten food pellets in salmon farm waters is another concern as are health concerns surrounding the consumption of farmed salmon, which Greenberg also discusses. While detractors say Mercury and PCB levels are higher than in wild-caught salmon, Greenberg refutes the Mercury claim but not the PCB claim. He found that PCB levels are higher in farmed fish because of the ground fish pellets fed to the captives. But, he also reports on a new kind of fish farm that could eliminate both PCB concerns and pollution concerns surrounding farmed fish.

On page 69 of Four Fishes, Greenberg describes integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, or IMTA, where fish are raised with other organisms that help filter the waste. These polycultures, as he refers to them, combine salmon, seaweed, and mussels. The seaweed provide the salmon with nutrients, the mussels eat the waste, and you have two products to sell. Reading his description of this practice, which can be traced back thousands of years to the Chinese, gave me the same feeling I had when reading about Polyface Farms in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: it is pure poetry.

I'm hopeful that efforts described here and increased awareness will mean hope for wild salmon. Next on the fish platter: tuna. I happen to love tuna as well; I hope the prognosis is better.

STRONGHOLDS; Hope for wild pacific salmon from iLCP on Vimeo.