Wild vs. Farmed. Fish, that is.

If we've learned one thing along this food journey, it's this: All food is not created equal.

And fish is no exception.

Now, I know a lot of people aren't huge fish eaters, but on our homestead, we could eat it every day.  

We do live along the great Columbia, Wenatchee, and Icicle Rivers (which are swimming with wild salmon and other wonderful fish!) but unfortunately, one must know what one is doing in order to catch them - and the equipment is expensive!  Back in high school, I spent a lot of time fishing and was able to put up bags of frozen salmon during the summer.  But alas, salmon fishing has taken a back seat to everything else in life and so it goes.

Like all our other meats, I've been trying to find a good source for it locally.  Seattle Fish Company will ship to us overnight and has a great selection of wild-caught fish (much of the fish is caught in Alaska).  Alaska Seaffod also has made it super easy to order fresh seafood online - how convenient!  And Wild Pacific Salmon sells direct from the fisherman to you!  Still, the prices are far more than we can pay at the moment.  But I haven't given up hope!  I just need to find the right source is all...

Like a local fisherman, maybe?  Anyone out there?  Hello?

You may wonder why I even care where I get the fish from.  I mean, they have lots of fish at the store - right?  But have you ever looked closely at the labels?  Have you read things like "red dye added" and "farm-raised in Thailand"?  Well, unfortunately, that inexpensive and farmed fish comes at a sacrifice to quality, sustainability, and health of the fish. 

Red dye is often added to the flesh of salmon so that it has that healthy, pink glow that wild caught salmon does.  Farm-raised salmon doesn't have the same bright color as wild salmon, and so, they add dye to it.  Lovely.  Consider this information found at Whole Foods:

In the wild, salmon absorb carotenoids from eating pink krill. On the aquafarm, their rich pink hue is supplied by canthaxanthin, a synthetic pigment manufactured by Hoffman-La Roche. Fish farmers can choose just what shade of peach their fish will display from the pharmaceutical company's trademarked SalmoFan, a color swatch similar to those you'd find in a paint store. Without help from Hoffman LaRoche, the flesh of farmed salmon would be a pale halibut grey. 

European health officials have debated whether the canthaxanthin added to the feed to give farmed salmon their pink hue poses any human health risk. Canthaxanthin was linked to retinal damage in people when taken as a sunless tanning pill, leading the British to ban its use as a tanning agent. (In the U.S., it's still available.) 

As for its use in animal feed, European health officials have debated whether the canthaxanthin added to the feed to give farmed salmon their pink hue poses any human health risk. The European Commission Scientific Committee on Animal Nutrition (SCAN) issued a warning several years ago about the pigment and urged the industry to find an alternative. In 2002, SCAN reviewed the maximum levels of canthaxanthin in fish feeds and determined that the allowable level of 80 milligrams of canthaxanthin per kilogram in feed was too high, and that consumers who ate large amounts of salmon were likely to exceed the Acceptable Daily Intake of 0.03 milligrams per kilogram human body weight. In 1997, the EU's Scientific Committee on Food recognized a link between canthaxanthin intake and retinal problems, so in April 2002, SCAN suggested lowering the level of canthaxanthin to 25 milligrams per kilogram in feed for salmonids (baby salmon). To date, no government has banned canthaxanthin from animal feed. 

Canthaxanthin was linked to retinal damage in people when taken as a sunless tanning pill, leading the British to ban its use as a tanning agent. (In the U.S., it's still available.) Consumed In high amounts, canthaxanthin can produce an accumulation of pigments in the retina of the eye and adversely affect sight.

 

Farm-raised fish, well, where do I even start.  Stuart and I got into a big conversation about this at the market the other day, because he didn't think that feeding fish corn to fatten them (as they do in fish farming) was necessarily wrong.  "But fish aren't supposed to eat corn!", I said sternly.  Unfortunately, modern agriculture things everything needs to eat corn.  Cows.  Pigs.  Chickens.  Fish.  Why?  Because corn makes them fatten quickly.  One of the first rules I learned in my Beef Production major was this - if you want to fatten your cattle, stuff them with corn.

What do we think corn will do to us?

Not only are farm-raised fish fed an artificial diet, but they frankly are raised in (more often than not) nasty environments.  Like a feed-lot in the water, these farms are designed for only one thing: fattening fish.  They are overcrowded, and thus, loads of antibiotics are fed to the fish to keep them healthy.  But not only antibiotics - pesticides, too.  It's lengthy, but read this:

Disease and parasites, which would normally exist in relatively low levels in fish scattered around the oceans, can run rampant in densely packed oceanic feedlots. To survive, farmed fish are vaccinated as small fry. Later, they are given antibiotics or pesticides to ward off infection. 

Sea lice, in particular, are a problem. In a recent L.A. Times story, Alexandra Morton, an independent biologist and critic of salmon farms, is quoted as beginning to see sea lice in 2001 when a fisherman brought her two baby pink salmon covered with them. Examining more than 700 baby pink salmon around farms, she found that 78 percent were covered with a fatal load of sea lice while juvenile salmon she netted farther from the farms were largely lice-free. 

While salmon farmers have discounted Morton's concerns saying that sea lice are also found in the wild, at the first sign of an outbreak, they add the pesticide emamectin benzoate to the feed. According to officials, the use of pesticides should pose no problem for consumers since Canadian rules demand that pesticide use be stopped 25 days before harvest to ensure all residues are flushed from the fish. 

Scientists in the United States are far more concerned about two preliminary studies-one in British Columbia and one in Great Britain-both of which showed farmed salmon accumulate more cancer-causing PCBs and toxic dioxins than wild salmon. 

The reason for this pesticide concentration is the salmon feed. Pesticides, including those now outlawed in the United States, have circulated into the ocean where they are absorbed by marine life and accumulate in their fat, which is distilled into the concentrated fish oil that is a major ingredient in salmon feed. Salmon feed contains higher concentrations of fish oil-extracted from sardines, anchovies and other ground-up fish-than wild salmon normally consume. Scientists in the U.S. are currently trying to determine the extent of the pesticide contamination in farmed salmon and what levels are safe for human consumption. 

Research on this issue published July 30, 2003, by the Environmental Working Group, indicates that levels of carcinogenic chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) found in farmed salmon purchased from U.S. grocery stores are so much higher than levels of PCBs found in wild salmon that they pose an increased risk for cancer. PCBs have been banned in the US for use in all but completely closed areas since 1979, but they persist in the environment and end up in animal fat. 

When farmed salmon from U.S. grocery stores was tested, the farmed salmon, which contains up to twice the fat of wild salmon, was found to contain 16 times the PCBs found in wild salmon, 4 times the levels in beef, and 3.4 times the levels found in other seafood. Other studies done in Canada, Ireland and Britain have produced similar findings.(September 8, 2003)

Isn't that just lovely.

And if remnants of antibiotics, dye, and corn aren't enough to make us quickly grab for wild caught fish, there's even more reasons:

- Farm-raised Fish Contain More Pro-inflammatory Omega-6 Fats

- Wild Fish Provide More Omega-3 Fats

- Wild-caught fish contain (on average) three times less fat than the same farm-raised fish

- Wild salmon have a 20% higher protein content

I don't wish to be one of those scare-you-till-you-agree-to-change bloggers.  But I do think it's important for us to question why we eat what we do, where it comes from, how that affects our health.


When I told Stuart I was writing this post, he asked a good question.  What if people can't afford wild-caught fish prices?  In my opinion, it's more important to eat high quality chicken (if that's all you can afford) than cheap farm-raised seafood.  Eat the best of what you can afford.  Even if you're living frugally, you can still make great mineral rich stocks, eat lots of cheap vegetables (carrots, celery, beets, onions, potatoes, zucchini, etc.), buy organic grains, rice and beans (bulk is cheapest!), and eat high quality animal fats.  Instead of buying cheap, commercial-produced steaks opt for grass-fed hamburger.  The price is less and the quality is so much better.
  

If you'd like to read further about fish farming, HERE is the great article I quoted from (along with references).  HERE is another article on farmed salmon from Chile you may find interesting.  And lastly, THIS ARTICLE said what I wanted to say, but probably a lot better.  Go figure.

Your thoughts?!