Next time your server or your supermarket tries to sell you Salmon, ask where it comes from. If it is “Atlantic Salmon,” tell them to fuck off. Well, if you want to be polite, you can just say “no thank you, I don’t eat that garbage, and you shouldn’t be selling it, you soulless heathen fuckhead.”
There is no such thing as Atlantic Salmon. Well, correction, there really isn’t such a thing as a commercially viable Atlantic Salmon fishery. If it comes from the Atlantic, there’s a 99% chance that it is farm-raised. And if it is farm-raised, then it is about as healthy for you as mass-raised chicken. It likely lacks most of the omega 3s that make wild-caught Pacific salmon so fucking awesome. In fact, it wouldn’t even be “salmon colored” if the farmers didn’t feed it color pellets. (source)
Trust me. I used to be a salmon fisherman before I was a lawyer.
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OK by this logic arctic char and trout should not be pink. And salmon migrating upstream to spawn in fresh water, too horny to eat…
They should not be great inside not turning rpink outside as well as in
Sorry, this lurker is going to disagree with you.
I think farm-raised salmon (or farm-raised fish in general) are one of the greatest developments since the invention of wheat farming. There are just too damn many people on the planet to rely on hunter-gatherer methods to feed them.
Sure, farm-raised salmon don’t have the flavor of wild-caught salmon, but fresh/frozen farm salmon still taste better than canned salmon. When I was a kid, even canned salmon was a rare treat because it was so expensive; now, fresh salmon is affordable for most everyone, because of farming.
Farmed fish driving wild-caught fish out of the market takes the pressure off the wild fish stocks; now they might have a chance to rebound. The Atlantic cod fisheries were shut down for a long time after the vast schools of the Grand Banks were destroyed by overfishing. And now there is cod farming…
It’s better than canned <- that should move some product.
I heard a new one the other day: “Faroe Island Salmon.” Of course, the Faroe Islands are located in …. the North Atlantic.
Dan – you make no sense at all. A big part of the reason salmon (and some trout and char) are pink is due to diet. Your spawning comment is just utter nonsense.
Dragoness Eclectic – You should read up on the ‘farming’ of salmon. The fish are dosed with massive amounts of antibiotics and vitamins to fight disease and infection in the overcrowded pens they are in. Or any other farmed fish, many species of which are farmed in China and Vietnam in horrid conditions, esp. Tilapia, which is rarely wild caught and is one of the most counterfeited fish options on the menus of your local restaurant. You are absolutely correct about overfishing but our current incarnation of factory farm fish raising is no solution. Even in B.C., where more eco-friendly salmon farming is happening still the industry has had to deal with viral outbreaks in salmon farms and the fisheries don’t reveal information on pathogens and disease for fish that die during the farming process.
And while Norman Borlaug is credited with saving close to a billion lives with dwarf wheat, we (the planetary we) have changed the make up of wheat so much to increase yield and resist drought and pests that modern wheat has lost many of the health benefits it once had. All in we are feed more people, but we are feeding them crap, from wheat to fish to the mass-raised chicken Marc references above.
Kirsten – There is a tiny amount of wild salmon in the Atlantic, hence the reason Marc indicated 99%. They migrate in the rivers of Ireland and Scotland after being introduced some time ago, but the numbers are minuscule and almost none of that salmon is exported beyond Ireland and UK, there simply isn’t the volume to make it economically feasible.