Some environmentalists grasp at straws to shoot down alternatives that enable expanding consumption in sustainable ways, because what many really want is to promote asceticism. New generations of contained aquaculture have gotten Seafood Watch’s recommendation, correcting pollution and pest problems with open aquaculture methods. Contained aquaculture offers a real way forward for sustainable seafood. But salmon raised that way is still white without the additive. That doesn’t actually have any impact on the healthiness or taste of the fish. (My wife is a sixth generation Oregonian, where salmon is serious business, and prefers the taste of farmed Norwegian Atlantic to wild caught sockeye.)
Ah come on it's not just asceticism. Anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel and other small fish populations are currently being decimated, and 99% of the catch goes to producing... farmed meat, including salmon. Even if they've solved pollution & disease, if you're putting in 2lbs of unsustainably caught wild fish and getting out 1lb of farmed fish, you don't have a sustainable model.
It's kind of tragically ironic- those small fish are incredibly healthy food & quite inexpensive.
Mackerel in particular is far superior to salmon in my opinion, but few seem to even give it a chance. There seems to be a widespread public bias against canned fish in general, and small canned fish in particular (larger canned fish such as tuna or salmon seem to be more accepted.)
If anybody hasn't tried canned mackerel, I strongly recommend it. A can of mackerel and some crackers makes a super convenient and tasty lunch.
I don't know anything about canned mackerel, I'll give it a try the next time I'm at the grocery store. But as far as sushi goes, mackerel is one of my least favorite. I can't quite say way. I eat plenty of "fishy" fish but that one is fishy in a unique way.
My favorite Japanese restaurants in Beijing (I've never been to Japan) weren't sushi places, they were sort of barbecue places. A small roasted mackerel was often one of the best things on the menu. I'm making myself nostalgic just thinking about it...
I bought a can of mackerel the other day at the suggestion of another HN poster. It was amazing, and I bought a whole case of 12 on Amazon. I don’t know why it tastes so good but I’m happy I tried it!
I think we read the same comment. I picked up a can when I was out grocery shopping yesterday, too, realizing I had always passedtl canned mackarel up for who knows what reason. It's good, I'll be adding it to my lunch rotation for sure.
Farmed Norwegian Salmon is one of the most toxic fish out there....
Unless something has changed in the last two years, I'd steer clear of that stuff....
The problem with scare media like that is that it does nothing to put the risk in context. What is the actual danger from eating fish with high levels of PCBs? The EPA guidance is based on a 1 in 100,000 increase in cancer risk over 70 years, based on extrapolating from animal testing to humans. There is no real scientific evidence that eating fish with elevated PCBs actually results in a measurable increase in cancer risk: https://seafood.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/snic/pcb....
To put that into perspective, moving from New York to Chicago will increase your risk of being murdered in a single year by 15 in 100,000, and your 70-year risk of being murdered by 1 in 100. Smoking and then quitting raises your lifetime risk of lung cancer by 3-5 in 100.
> The problem with scare media like that is that it does nothing to put the risk in context. What is the actual danger from eating fish with high levels of PCBs
The problem with not watching the documentary you choose to comment on is that you'll end up strawmanning the video you didn't watch or responding with a red herring.
If you had watched the documentary, you would have known that the issue goes far, far beyond PCBs.
I’m aware of the other problems with open aquaculture. But OP referred to the “toxic” nature of the fish. What’s “toxic” besides the PCBs? Farmed salmon is lower in mercury, or example.
(Also, you’re right, I didn’t watch the videos. As a rule, I don’t watch informational content in video form, because it’s a stupid way to present information. They’re geared to obfuscating and emotionalizing topics in ways that are harder to do in written documents with citations and footnotes.)
> But OP referred to the “toxic” nature of the fish. What’s “toxic” besides the PCBs?
If you had watched the documentary you commented on, you would know. Insecticides, dioxins, various neurotoxins, heavy metals, and various toxic waste chemicals from oil production and industry.
> Farmed salmon is lower in mercury, or example.
If you had watched the documentary you commented on, you would know that this is not necessarily true, and not at all true for the regions that the video covered.
Salmon is a whitefish. The pink/red color of their (wild caught) flesh is due to their diet at sea. Specifically, shrimp eat algae which has a pigment that gives their shells and flesh a pinkish color and Salmon eat shrimp.
Sorry, this was just a joke at the expense of the op. The op who asked the question obviously didn't read the article as the fact that farmed salmon is dyed was literally the first line. The second is why it was pink in nature.
Simple: Aesthetics are just about the only input we have when comparing similar items at the store. If you see a bright red, salmon-colored piece of salmon next to a grey one, the price difference would probably have to be significant to overcome that disparity.
Same thing with produce – there’s no good reason to dip anything in wax, but all else being more or less equal, people will almost always pick the shiny apple over the dull one.
There was a longer report I think the above article was based on. I recall watching the section where a low-level employee talked about adding the chemical that makes the flesh go pink. The reporter asked whether that was any concern. The response was “Well, doesn’t everything have chemicals in it these days?”
Interestingly, I just ate brook trout out of a lake in Wyoming, and the meat was deep pink, almost red. I know each of the trout species are more closely related to at least one type of salmon than they are to each other, but I've never seen freshwater fish that color. I can't think of anything in the lake that's anything like the krill / crustaceans named as the cause of the color in the article...
Trout and Salmon aren't proper clades. What you call the fish depends on where it lives, not what it's related to. In fact Rainbow Trout and Steelhead Salmon aren't merely closely related, they are literally the same species and will interbreed. Lake dwelling trout are the descendents of ocean-going ancestors that got stuck by dams and floods.
I'm aware - my point was exactly that - Atlantic salmon and brown trout are in the same genus, whereas pacific salmon and rainbow trout are in a different genus. Certain combinations of varieties of trout and salmon are more closely related to each other than other varieties of trout are to other varieties of trout.
I eat the farmed atlantic salmon from Whole Foods several times a week. It tastes way better than the wild salmon and is half the price.
Whole Foods claims it is responsibly and sustainably farmed. They are obviously biased, so I can't be certain. But the farmed salmon definitely wins on price and flavor.
That link doesn't include any numbers for farmed salmon. There are three entries in their sample database, all wild (one each raw, baked and canned -- all look healthy enough).
It's also, let's be clear, a front for hawking books and seminars by Monica Reinagel, a "nutritionist" with no particular science background or history of work on the subject.
Frankly that's sort of a garbage link. In the real world there's plenty of science on inflammation in general, but very little conclusive numbers on diet, and AFAIK absolutely no real work showing an effect as specific as "farmed vs. wild fish", especially at the significance you seem to be claiming.
Most meat has dyes of some sort. I'm not sure this is really that big of a bugaboo. A lot of food in general has food colorants that are entirely made in a lab.
I'm guessing this is not true for all species of salmon. I've "caught" salmon from a farm in New Zealand and the meat was a very deep orange-red colour.
In my experience almost all cheese is not orange. Orange cheese is a processed American, and Red Leicester (among other varieties, I just picked a common one - Limburger anyone?) thing.
Almost all types of cheese are not orange, but almost all cheese is orange. The orange varieties are very popular.
Here in the USA, "orange cheese" usually refers to Cheddar, which is almost always orange. It has nothing to do with any place named Cheddar; the cheese would be overripe if shipped that far. You could just about say that this is our standard cheese.
I don't live in the USA. Very little cheese here is orange. I've never seen orange cheddar - I think that's a "USA Cheddar" thing.
Edit: I also know what Annatto is. I'm merely pointing out that claiming that "almost all cheese is orange" is very USA centric. (probably also limited to only some regions of the USA too, presumably ones you know about - while not living there I do consume a lot of American TV, and I don't notice all cheese being orange.)
I've lived in 4 states, widely spread around the country. I'm not an urban dweller.
In a typical supermarket, there might be dozens of types of cheese. Only a few types are orange. So going by type, it might be only 5% orange. Nevertheless, the majority of the cheese (by volume or by mass) is orange.
The store might stock one row of sliced baby swiss, for a total of 10 pounds. The store will do that for several ripenesses of Cheddar (mild, medium, sharp, extra sharp) times several brands, totaling perhaps 150 pounds of cheese... but that is just sliced cheese. The baby swiss is only available in slices. Cheddar is also available in small bags, giving another 200 pounds of cheese. Cheddar is also available in large bags, giving another 200 pounds of cheese. Cheddar is also available in half-pound blocks, in one-pound blocks, in five-pound blocks, in half-pound bags of cubes, and in one-pound bags of sticks. That is probably at least another 300 pounds of cheese. There could be half a ton of Cheddar on display. Add in 100 pounds of Colby and 100 pounds of American, and there is an awful lot of orange cheese.
FYI, most of the non-orange cheese is Mozzarella. Again, this is by volume or by mass.
People with simple taste in cheese can simply refer to it as "orange cheese" (Cheddar) and "pizza cheese" (Mozzarella).
The color is a very useful distinction. When you have both types of cheese in unlabeled containers in your refrigerator, color ensures that the pizza cheese goes on pizza and the orange cheese goes elsewhere. You don't mix them up. Without that color, you'd have to label the cheese or taste it before use.
Cheddar and Colby are both yellow cheeses in Australia. I only associate orange with "American" cheese, and what Subway calls "old English" which I suspect is also just American cheese rebranded for an Australian market.
Many traditional high quality English and French cheeses have been historically flavoured with additives that also dye them. It isn’t something only people ignorant of cheese do.
I am aware of that. I wasn't implying anything about the relative qualities of different kinds of cheese - just that "all cheese is orange" is a very USA-centric thing. (I suspect it's also a regional thing. Cheddar isn't orange in every state right?)
At every grocery store in the US where I've ever checked, they sell both "white" (off-white) and "yellow" (yellow/orange) cheddar. Yellow is more popular.
They also sell colby, which is a type of cheddar, also usually yellow.
What is regional in the US is the shape of sticks of butter! It's either "Eastern-pack" or "Western-pack" depending on which side of the Rocky Mountains. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter#United_States
Since the Rocky Mountains are the continental divide, that means you can stand in a spot where rain the falls to one side of you ends up in the Pacific Ocean and on its way passes by sticks of butter in one shape, and rain that falls on your other side ends up in the Atlantic Ocean and passes by differently shaped sticks of butter on its way.
I’m in MN (not quite Wisconsin but we love our cheese too) and there’s a ton of cheddar both white and orange. Pretty much any cheddar producer up here that makes orange would also make white. I don’t think it’s as ubiquitous as you’d expect.
