SPECIAL REPORTS

The Wild Salmon Debate

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Pictured Recipe: New World Gravlax

Yours is one of the few—1 in 500, 1 in 1,000—that makes it. He lives a year or two, grows large enough to move downstream. After a couple weeks he reaches a brackish estuary where he remains for a few days acclimating to saltwater. Then he enters the North Pacific. He eats with an open mind—other fish, mollusks, and lots and lots of krill and other planktonic crustacea that have feasted on red algae. This diet turns his flesh pink and rich in omega-3 fatty acids. When he is six or seven years old—as young as two in some species—he will need this fat to fuel his swim upriver to spawn. Once he enters the river he will not eat, and he may have to swim for days. Some fish swim only a dozen or a few score miles to spawn; others will swim hundreds. Alaska’s Copper River salmon, an exceptionally fatty and tasty fish, swims only 300 miles, but in doing so climbs 4,000 vertical feet. Your fish might swim 1,200 miles before it finds its spawning site, wiggles over its redd, and then dies. Or, it would have had it not been caught off the coast a few days ago, iced, boxed and shipped to the restaurant where it now greets you.

But perhaps you ordered a farmed salmon—that is to say, an Atlantic species. Virtually all Atlantic salmon sold in North America come from farms. They could hardly do otherwise, for overfishing and the damming and pollution of rivers in Europe and North America have destroyed the once-great wild fishery for Salmo salar, native to the North Atlantic and all its shores. Wild Atlantic salmon are now on the Endangered Species List. Because they grow faster than most of the Pacific species and better tolerate the crowding of the net pens, farmed Atlantics account for about 85 percent of all farmed salmon worldwide. (Some farms raise Pacific chinooks because they sell for upward of $20 a pound.)

The fish before you, then, represents the union of egg and sperm surgically extracted, quite possibly at different facilities, and shipped separately to its birthplace, which is likely a hatchery and fish farm in British Columbia or Washington, or possibly Scotland or Japan, or perhaps Chile or New Brunswick or New Zealand.

No matter where it’s hatched and raised, this salmon is still an Atlantic salmon. Once fertilized, the egg is incubated and hatched. The fry spends a year or so in freshwater tanks gradually made salty. Then your fish, some 8 to 10 inches long, is vaccinated against an array of infectious diseases, which are a constant threat in the crowded net pen into which the fish is now placed. The pen—a bowl-shaped net, essentially, with its rim at sea level—is about 30 to 100 meters across. It holds tens of thousands of fish. Instead of roaming the seas and swimming hundreds of miles to spawn, these fish never travel more than a few yards. Here in its pen your salmon fattens up on fish pellets. The pellets contain fish meal, fish oil, perhaps grains, and invariably an additive to pinken the fish’s flesh—usually astaxanthin, a carotenoid derived from commercially grown red yeast or algae. Given bountiful food and little work, your fish grows apace. When it’s a couple of years old and a couple of feet long and weighs 8 or 10 pounds it is netted, killed and packaged, iced and shipped.

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