June 9, 2008
~ Sardines With Your Bagel?
By TARAS GRESCOE

Montreal

THE first chinook salmon from Alaska's Copper River arrived in Seattle
last month, for shipment to fish counters throughout the country. With
the commercial chinook season in California and most of Oregon canceled
for the first time in 160 years, Alaska chinook were going for record
prices: $40 a pound for fillet.

There was a time that the thought of a good salmon meal would leave me
feeling faint with desire. Just imagining a toasted bagel papered with
near-translucent slices of lox, a roll of vinegared rice stuffed with
crispy salmon skin or a thick steak of lightly grilled chinook would
have me searching for the nearest deli, sushi bar or bistro.

It was an impulse I never hesitated to indulge. Salmon — so low in
saturated fats, so high in brain-protective omega-3 fatty acids — was
that rarest of commodities: a guilt-free, heart-healthy
self-indulgence, and one of the cleanest forms of protein around.

Not any more. Wild Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct, and runs
of Pacific salmon south of the Alaska panhandle are experiencing
catastrophic collapses. This year, for the sake of the remaining wild
salmon on the West Coast, as well as my own health, I'm changing my
diet. Whether it's wild or farmed, I'm swearing off salmon.

It's not a decision I make lightly. I grew up eating wild salmon. As a
boy, I was given my first chunk of maple-smoked salmon at a dude ranch
in northern British Columbia by a crusty old lawyer from Tennessee
named Lucius Burch ("better than candy," he cackled — and it was). Wild
salmon is my madeleine: it is the taste of my childhood.

Until recently, it was something for which I was willing to pay a
premium. But with so many fisheries closed this year, I can no longer
afford to splurge on sustainably fished salmon. It's just too scarce
and too expensive.

What happened to the mighty chinook of the Pacific Northwest? Regional
fisheries officials have blamed ocean conditions for a temporary
decline in the plankton and small fish that juvenile salmon feed on.
But most of the problem is man-made.

Spawning salmon need gravel streambeds and cold, fast-running water to
lay their eggs. Giant pumps have been piping water from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to towns and farms in California's
Central Valley, degrading river habitat and even sucking up young fish
before they reach the sea. Farther north, dams on the Snake River have
prevented egg-bearing fish from reaching streambeds inland.

Overfishing is also a factor; too many nets have been scooping up too
many fish for too long. What's more, higher water temperatures brought
on by global warming prevent the eggs of spawning females from
maturing. It's not surprising that the only consistently healthy salmon
runs left are those in the cold waters of Alaska.

The fact that salmon is still available in supermarkets, and is cheaper
than it ever was, is no comfort. Ninety percent of the fresh salmon
consumed in the United States is from farms, and I have come to believe
that the farmed product is not a healthy alternative to wild.

Three Norwegian-owned companies dominate the salmon-farming industry in
North America, and their offshore net-cages dot long stretches of the
west coast of the Americas. In Chile, overcrowding in these oceanic
feedlots led to this year's epidemic of infectious salmon anemia, a
disease that has killed millions of fish and left the flesh of
survivors riddled with lesions.

The situation in Canada, which supplies the United States with 40
percent of its farmed salmon, is not much better. In British Columbia,
offshore net-cages are breeding grounds for thumbtack-sized parasites
called sea lice. In the Broughton Archipelago, a jigsaw of islands off
the province's central coast, wild pink salmon are infested with the
crustaceans. Scientists think that the tens of millions of salmon in
Broughton's 27 Norwegian-owned farms are attracting sea lice and
passing them on to wild fish, killing them. They say that this
infestation could drive Broughton's pink salmon to extinction by 2011.

To rid salmon of the lice, fish farmers spike their feed with a strong
pesticide called emamectin benzoate, which when administered to rats
and dogs causes tremors, spinal deterioration and muscle atrophy. The
United States Food and Drug Administration, already hard-pressed to
inspect imported Asian seafood for antibiotic and fungicide residues,
does not test imported salmon for emamectin benzoate. In other words,
the farmed salmon in nearly every American supermarket may contain this
pesticide, which on land is used to rid diseased trees of pine beetles.
It is not a substance I want in my body.

I avoid farmed salmon for other reasons. It takes four pounds of small
fish like sardines and anchovies to make a single pound of farmed
salmon, a process that deprives humans of precious protein. (Feedmakers
have lately increased the proportion of soy in the pellets, which means
the fish have even lower levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids.)
Organic farmed salmon would be a good option, if the term meant
something — outside Europe, there is still no credible, widely
available eco-label for responsibly raised farmed salmon.

Fish farming is an essential industry, but it must be sustainable.
Striped bass, trout, Arctic char and even ocean species like halibut
and cod are already being raised in concrete tanks, which prevent the
transmission of disease and parasites to wild fish. A few pioneering
companies have started raising salmon the same way. Such techniques
have to become the industry norm.

In the Atlantic, overfishing, habitat destruction, disease and
parasites from farms have left only struggling remnant populations of
the ocean's original salmon stocks. If we don't want the same thing to
happen in the Pacific, we need to give the salmon a break. Legislators
could start by calling on companies to remove net-cages from migration
routes, dismantling superannuated dams, reducing fishing quotas in
rivers and oceans and committing money to habitat restoration.
Consumers can help by looking at salmon as an occasional luxury, rather
than expecting it as an alternative to chicken or beef in in-flight
meals.

If my hankering for salmon gets the better of me, I suppose I could eat
wild salmon from Alaska. The state does not permit salmon farms in its
coastal waters, and its cold rivers still teem with healthy salmon
runs. But as much as I'd enjoy a fresh chinook fillet from the Copper
River, at $2.50 an ounce this summer, I just can't afford it.

So, I'll wait for next year and hope the West Coast fisheries show
signs of recovery. Until then — or until salmon farmers convince me
they've cleaned up their act — I'll be eating closer to the bottom of
the food chain.

Sardines, it turns out, taste pretty good barbecued.

~Taras Grescoe is the author of "Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood."