The REAL Cost of Farmed Salmon

It's Tuesday morning and you're mentally making your shopping list for a spin by the grocery store on the way home from work. Butter, pizza dough, toilet paper, and salmon...because you've been told that salmon is a sustainable fishery. This afternoon when you get to the store, you'll see "Fresh Farmed Atlantic Salmon $7.99" and "Frozen Wild Alaskan Salmon $10.99." So, as a YBG, you'll choose the cheaper farmed fish and be on your merry way, right? WRONG!

On the surface, it seems that farmed salmon are cheaper than wild, but when you look at the real cost of the farmed fish, it's actually much higher than the wild variety. But...I see...$3, you stutter. Well, wild salmon eat fish, but at the farms they are fed pellets of fish meal, fish oil, and added food coloring to make their flesh artificially pink. The fish meal food is made up of wild fish, and it takes 8 tons of wild fish to make up 1 ton of fish oil for their feed. Not very efficient, is it?

Also, crowded farm fish are fed antibiotics to ward off infection. In fact, farmed salmon have more antibiotics administered by weight than any other form of livestock.

Finally, Atlantic salmon are being farmed in the Pacific, and they regularly escape from their nets. Because Atlantic salmon are not native to the Pacific Ocean, when they breed with Pacific salmon, their offspring are rendered infertile further depressing wild salmon populations.

So, next time you're at the store, contemplating that $3 you could save...think again and make the right decision for yourself, salmon, and our oceans (you can put back that pint of B&J's instead, right?).

PS It is important you know that fresh wild salmon is available in the winter only. If you are eating wild salmon any other time and you bought it fresh, it had to have been previously frozen or it is not wild salmon.