Dine Well on Farm Fish Spiced With Bugs and Poisons

Thursday last Juliet Eilperin and Marc Kaufman reported in The Washington Post on how salt-water net pens jammed with hatchery salmon–commonly called “fish farms”–attract and grow parasites, sea lice, that attach themselves to passing juvenile wild salmon and kill them off and thus destroy runs of wild salmon.

Saturday David Barboza in The New York Times reported on the stew of sewage, pharmaceuticals and chemicals that cancer your body that fish on Chinese “fish farms” swim in and help place on the dinner tables of Chinese and Americans and other folk around the world. Made me want to rush out to buy a package of Chinese-raised prawns from my local supermarket. Nothing like a mist of PCBs rising from the frying pan to stir the appetite.

Either story could have been written about either set of “farms,” so-called because for the ignorant “farm” connotes pleasant pastoral images of Bossy and friends grazing on buttercups.

And in most countries, “farms” have dispensation from most pollution and health laws, while at the same time bring government subsidy checks to their “farmers.” Such tillers of the soil in the U.S. often are Cargill Corp. and other multi-national giants or doctors, dentists, actors, lawyers, etc., reaping income-tax write offs with one hand and grabbing a subsidy check with the other.

Most large dairies now operating in the American West are giant, filthy feed lots, with the cattle in them caked to their udders in muck stinking with manure. No one who has inspected such enterprises wants to drink milk again.

Fish farms are no different. Those in Puget Sound each deposit daily onto the sea bottom the fecal equivalent of what a town of 10,000 flushes daily

The fish in them, jammed together, dine on fish meal full of pharmaceuticals to save as many as possible from dying from disease. Even so, upwards of 50 percent of each net batch die from bacteria and viruses. These dead fish, called “morts” by Norwegian, British and American and Canadian operators, are not supposed to be sold for eating. But there are no inspectors looking at fish packers like there are meat inspectors at meat packers. “Morts” magically disappear into packing plants and end up with other salmon filets at your kindly Safeway.

The fish meal also is full of PCBs and other cancer-making goodies that likewise get transported to one’s dinner plate, fork, mouth and gut. Wild fish carry nowhere near this load, though they carry some thanks to all the crap the world pours into the oceans.

Few customers know that the “farm” salmon flesh they eat is infused with food dye, to color it from looking like squid flesh. Few countries in the world worry about what kind of dye gets used.

Salmon pens, aside from growing parasites to attack wild salmon, also grow and concentrate fish diseases that spread to wild fish, which don’t have the advantage of being fed antibiotics every day. The wild fish perish, but not before spreading the bugs to other wild fish.

Like “farm” lobbies everywhere, the fish raisers practice potent politics to protect themselves by passing out bucks to lobbyists and politicians, buying propaganda ads to keep the credulous eating their products and by mounting furious attacks on any attempt to regulate them. They hate having the protein they packed labeled “farm raised.”

Pen salmon escape into the wild by the 10s of thousands every year, everywhere, thanks to storms demolishing nets. These inferior fish breed with wild fish, by definition endangering or even wiping out the genes of wild stocks that evolution selected for a particular environment and certainly not for swimming in crowded pens.

Research shows that the offspring of hatchery/pen matings with wild fish have far greater natural mortality that pure wild-wild offspring, thus endangering even hybrids that spawn “naturally,” i.e., other than in a hatchery.

It’s probably too late to ban fish farming in the developed countries: Too many politicians dine on farm-fish money. It’s likely impossible to clean up the sewer-chemical fish farms of China: The whole country is a cesspool of biological and chemical pollution.

So the next time you dine in a restaurant on salmon or prawns or catfish or some other marine creature of unknown origin, bon appetit–and be sure to get your cancer checkups. Otherwise that lox may put you in a box.