Unpalatable truth of salmon farming should put you off cooking it

YOU may think that salmon farming has nothing to do with us here in Henley but you would be mistaken.

All Atlantic salmon you buy from the supermarket is farmed, the labelling is misleading. There is no such thing as sustainable or “responsibly sourced” farmed salmon.

Let me tell you about the hugely destructive aquaculture that is salmon farming: open net salmon farming takes place mainly in Scotland, located in lochs, and estuaries.

The genetically engineered Atlantic farmed salmon are hatched in freshwater containment units, raised in industrial-sized tanks or channels of running water for 12 to 18 months. They are then transferred to cages along the seashore where they continue to grow until slaughter.

Salmon farming in Scotland has grown exponentially since the Seventies and is predicted to grow by 400,000 tonnes per year by 2030.

It is often touted as an environmentally-friendly alternative to other forms of animal protein but in reality it wreaks havoc on the surrounding environment, the welfare of the fish is disgusting and the negative effect reaches as far as West Africa.

The salmon farms are plagued by parasitic sea lice, which form a cloud of disease around the open nets. They not only eat the farmed salmon alive, feeding on their scales, mucus and blood, but are infecting wild migrating fish that may swim by and, most worryingly, the endangered wild Atlantic salmon, which is on the ICUN red list.

The farms are obligated to count the sea lice numbers but only count around five fish per net and only count the female adult lice. This creates a skewed result aimed at making the farms look better than they are.

In 2022 WildFish, the charity which protects wild fish and their environment, found that 132 out of 192 farms breached their sea lice limits.

Jellyfish, the cleaners of the sea, are plaguing the nets and a population explosion due to warming waters of micro jellyfish are blocking the gills and killing the farmed salmon.

It is an horrific show of the most appalling animal welfare. To treat outbreaks of parasitic sea lice, these farms use a range of chemical interventions, which are lethal to other types of marine life, killing prawns, lobsters and crabs in particular.

Combined, Scottish salmon farms produce the same amount of waste as half of the Scottish human population. In 2020 more than five million litres of hydrogen peroxide were used on Scottish salmon farms.

Salmon are carnivorous fish, and it takes more than 440 wild caught fish to feed one farmed salmon. These fish are caught in huge numbers, often off the coast of West Africa, totally devastating low-income communities, leaving them without food to live on and no food security.

The farmed salmon are fed on this feed, made out of the wild fish and a soy pigment called astaxanthin to colour the fillets pink. Farmed salmon are naturally grey in colour. The fact that horrifies me most is, in an attempt to eradicate the sea lice, farms are trying some barbaric practices.

One of these is to use
so-called cleaner fish such as wrasse, which are supposed to eat the sea lice off the salmon. These fish are bred in their millions to meet the increasing demand from the salmon industry. They aren’t even very good at their job and are then killed at the end of a production cycle — usually about 18 months. In the wild, wrasse can live for up to 32 years.

Talking of animal welfare, on average more than 25 per cent of Scottish farmed salmon die before harvest and last year it was reported that more than 17.5 million farmed salmon died prematurely.

The majority of salmon is bought by women around my age (51) and it is a huge money spinner for supermarkets, especially around Christmas.

When asked if there is an alternative — I have to say, really there isn’t. No fish is sustainable, we have overfished our oceans to breaking point.

The only sustainable option would be mussels or a vegan alternative such as carrot lox, www.loveandlemons.com/carrot-lox. But, as always, it is better to do one thing than nothing.

Please consider taking salmon off your menu. If you are a chef, restaurant owner, or catering business (sporting or otherwise), join Wimbledon, the O2 Arena, Chelsea FC and more than 300 other chefs, restaurants and caterers in not using farmed salmon (www.offthetable.org) and let’s protect our precious blue spaces and see a return to waterways full of life, fit for salmon, humans and wildlife.