Go Wild!

I won’t cook with farmed salmon because I’ve looked at how it’s produced, and I don’t like what I see.

Farmed salmon are fed pellets containing synthetic dyes to turn their flesh orange (it would be gray without it). And because their crowded net

-pens breed diseases and parasites, their feed is also laced with antibiotics.

As if that weren’t enough, to kill the sea-lice rampant in these farms, the fish are often bathed in biocides.

This is not the kind of thing I want to feed my family!

Diseases and sea-lice from the farms are known to infect and kill wild salmon. The pens also attract marine mammals like seals and sea-lions, who drown trying to get into the nets— and hundreds are shot every year by salmon farmers.

According to the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR),

these net-pen farms can hold 750,000 farmed salmon in an area the size of four football fields.

This is the same biomass as 480 Indian bull elephants! All of the polluting wastes—feces, excess food laced with drugs and chemicals—fall through the nets to the ocean floor, smothering shellfish.

Those are some of the reasons that Sea Choice and the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch programs have red-listed net-pen farmed salmon in their “AVOID” category for seafood shoppers.

It’s important to note that all “Atlantic salmon” for sale in the marketplace is farmed.

There is no “wild Atlantic salmon” for sale anywhere in North America: native stocks in the Atlantic are commercially extinct.

There’s a lot of money being poured into PR campaigns by the salmon-farm industry to greenwash their product, but I don’t believe it.

When salmon farms raise their fish in enclosed, filtered tanks without chemicals, then I’ll think about buying it. There are some ‘closed containment’ systems operating in Washington, but oddly enough, all of their product goes to Canada—the same place that’s selling us the stuff farmed in the nets!

Will you take a second to add your voice to mine? With two clicks, you could send a message asking for safe, sustainable, wholesome food.

Those two clicks might just be what saves the wild salmon and all the creatures that depend on them!

Encourage retailers of farmed Atlantic salmon to switch to selling only wild-caught salmon by filling in your name and email below.

When you click ‘send’, your letter will go to the 6 top retailers of farmed salmon, telling them to stock only wild-caught Pacific salmon— until the salmon farms adopt “closed-containment” systems to protect our wild fish and our water.

Go Wild!