Come dinnertime, wild salmon is an excellent choice. Many of the Pacific fisheries are well managed, and the fish itself is healthful and delicious. The problem is that there isn’t very much of it. Worldwide, our annual wild salmon harvest comes to about 2 billion pounds, which sounds like a lot until you divide it by 7 billion earthlings and come up with one serving per person per year.
What’s a salmon eater to eat?
Go back as little as 10 years, and the answer was definitely not farmed salmon. “It was the thing you weren’t supposed to buy,” says Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund, which established the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to create sustainability standards for shellfish and fin fish aquaculture worldwide. When the industry was new, salmon farms were accused of polluting the oceans, spreading sea lice, fostering disease, allowing escapees and depleting the stocks of forage fish, up to seven pounds of which went into each pound of farmed Atlantic salmon. All of those accusations were true in some locales, and some were true in all.
But the salmon farmers did a funny thing. They listened. The survival of the industry depended on farmers cleaning up their act, and so that’s what they started to do.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Washington Post
