Farmed salmon- world’s most toxic food

creeper1

I’m pretty sure you can buy this in Ireland. It’s available in mainland China and also here in Taiwan. I always had imagined myself as eating free salmon in the pure waters of Norway. Apparently Scottish salmon and “Atlantic salmon” are just as bad.

Documentary evidence below

https://youtu.be/RYYf8cLUV5E

Atlantic Dawn

The amount of food needed to grow each salmon is criminal.

Bogwoppit

Haven’t watched the documentary but will try get to it later, wife is asleep beside me and I don’t want to wake her up!

So I’ve done a lot of my own research into this, part as a concerned citizen and part as a potential investor, I’m not involved in salmon farming or any other type of farming.

Just for a bit of balance though, here’s an independent report on antibiotic use across all agriculture in the UK https://www.ruma.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SO-309-RUMA-TTF-2-years-on-Full-Report-LR.pdf

Beef- 21mg/kg of antibiotic use in 2018
Pigs - 110mg/kg
Chicken- 12.4mg/kg
Sheep- 3-17mg/kg very limited data
Trout- 13mg/kg
Salmon-6.5mg/kg

I don’t know how old a sheep is before it’s slaughtered but I know a chicken is only about 6 weeks, a salmon is about 2 years. So a chicken gets nearly twice as much antibiotic in 6 weeks as a salmon gets in 2 years.

As for the food, salmon are cold blooded so don’t need to use food energy to produce heat, they also don’t have to use energy to support their own body weight. The feed conversion rate on a salmon farm is about 1.5kg of food to 1kg of growth from the investor reports I’ve read, chicken is next best at about 2/2.5. Pork is around 6 and I think beef is in the 20’s.
The use of fish meal is a concern but current data from the companies says there is only about 10% fish meal in the diet.

Fresh water use in salmon production is about 200 litres per kg, most of the growth is done in salt water, I can’t find where I I got the figures before for beef and pork but I remember beef was something like 10,000 litres per kg.

The 2 most common treatments for external parasites are hydrogen peroxide and freshwater. Neither is very toxic.

drunkmonkey

I would touch any food from that part of the world, there only going to start reporting the radiation levels in food from June to Taiwan. Fukushima is by no means resolved, there's a lot more waste to be dumped in the Pacific yet.

drunkmonkey

Actually screw that this looks like the world's most toxic food..


https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/photo-of-a-meal-served-in-a-limerick-hospital-branded-as-completely-unacceptable-38825253.html

Brought to you by Simon Harris in conjunction with the HSE.

malinheader

Need to be careful when reading labels. At a wedding one day I happened to ask where the salmon was sourced, I was told it was wild Atlantic salmon. Ok I asked where was it caught. Reply was it wasn't it's a caged salmon that was reared in the Atlantic. Apparently this is classed as wild Atlantic salmon and totally ok where advertising concerned.

Bogwoppit

malinheader wrote: »

Need to be careful when reading labels. At a wedding one day I happened to ask where the salmon was sourced, I was told it was wild Atlantic salmon. Ok I asked where was it caught. Reply was it wasn't it's a caged salmon that was reared in the Atlantic. Apparently this is classed as wild Atlantic salmon and totally ok where advertising concerned.

No, that’s mislabelling and is not ok where advertising is concerned. You can make a complaint to the food standards authority maybe.
Farmed cannot be sold as wild. Mislabelling is rife in the fish industry as a whole and unless you really know your stuff then you will be caught out. However, as we saw with the horse meat scandal, mislabelling is by no means limited to the fish industry.

Darc19

malinheader wrote: »

Need to be careful when reading labels. At a wedding one day I happened to ask where the salmon was sourced, I was told it was wild Atlantic salmon. Ok I asked where was it caught. Reply was it wasn't it's a caged salmon that was reared in the Atlantic. Apparently this is classed as wild Atlantic salmon and totally ok where advertising concerned.

So a young waiter/waitress tells you something and you claim that's misleading advertising?

A lot of Irish, Scottish and Norwegian farmed salmon is called "Atlantic farmed salmon"

The cages are in inlets and allow for the natural ebb and flow of tides and seawater to give a better farmed product.

Yes, antibiotics are used, yes its intense like most farming, but just like any other protest group, the documentary is utterly one sided.

Discodog

A friend of mine is a professional diver. He used to do some work for a local fish farm & it was a horrible job cleaning out the cages. He would never eat farmed Salmon & neither would I.

gozunda

Bogwoppit wrote: »

Haven’t watched the documentary but will try get to it later, wife is asleep beside me and I don’t want to wake her up!So I’ve done a lot of my own research into this, part as a concerned citizen and part as a potential investor, I’m not involved in salmon farming or any other type of farming.
Just for a bit of balance though, here’s an independent report on antibiotic use across all agriculture in the UK https://www.ruma.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SO-309-RUMA-TTF-2-years-on-Full-Report-LR.pdf
Beef- 21mg/kg of antibiotic use in 2018
Pigs - 110mg/kg
Chicken- 12.4mg/kg
Sheep- 3-17mg/kg very limited data
Trout- 13mg/kg
Salmon-6.5mg/kg

I don’t know how old a sheep is before it’s slaughtered but I know a chicken is only about 6 weeks, a salmon is about 2 years. So a chicken gets nearly twice as much antibiotic in 6 weeks as a salmon gets in 2 years.

As for the food, salmon are cold blooded so don’t need to use food energy to produce heat, they also don’t have to use energy to support their own body weight. The feed conversion rate on a salmon farm is about 1.5kg of food to 1kg of growth from the investor reports I’ve read, chicken is next best at about 2/2.5. Pork is around 6 and I think beef is in the 20’s.
The use of fish meal is a concern but current data from the companies says there is only about 10% fish meal in the diet.

Fresh water use in salmon production is about 200 litres per kg, most of the growth is done in salt water, I can’t find where I I got the figures before for beef and pork but I remember beef was something like 10,000 litres per kg.

The 2 most common treatments for external parasites are hydrogen peroxide and freshwater. Neither is very toxic.

A lot of the figures on things such as water use out there do not stand up to scrutiny or relate to American production figures or are not directly comparable between species.

With regard to water use for beef cattle in Ireland - only 169 lites of water per kg comes from blue water sources (ie Fresh water) whilst the remainder of approx 8,222 litres per kg comes from green water sources ( ie water coming direcly from rainfall falling on pasture) and stored in the soil and evaporated, transpired or incorporated by plants and then eaten by livestock.

Feed conversation rates need to look at what is being fed. In salmon farming it is nearly all highly processed feed with a high levels of nutrients and with protein used to enable rapid growth. intensive salmon farming is closer to commercial poulty farming than beef or sheep.

Ruminants ie cattle and sheep in Ireland are largely fed a diet consisting of low nutrient forages hence the lower conversion rates. Supplementary feed in the form of grain etc are fed only in relatively small amounts.

Antibiotic use in ruminants cattle, sheep etc is strictly controlled and are used on individual animals which require antibiotics for veterinary treatment etc. Young animals have the highest risk for contracting disease but Teagasc studies on cattle show that only 15-20% of animals are actually treated with antibiotics up to 6 months of age. With an average of just 7.11 mg/kg of antibiotic use in this age group. The figures for older animals are significantly lower.

As far as I'm aware salmon farms use a blanket approach to using antibiotics via largescale topical applications and not individual fish - where antibiotics are added to the water in which the fish are held or added to the feed thrown into the fish holding areas - this means the antibiotics leak into the wider environment and are taken up by other species etc.

igCorcaigh

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Actually screw that this looks like the world's most toxic food..

Brought to you by Simon Harris in conjunction with the HSE.

Saw that. What is that grey goo?

malinheader

Darc19 wrote: »

So a young waiter/waitress tells you something and you claim that's misleading advertising?

A lot of Irish, Scottish and Norwegian farmed salmon is called "Atlantic farmed salmon"

The cages are in inlets and allow for the natural ebb and flow of tides and seawater to give a better farmed product.

Yes, antibiotics are used, yes its intense like most farming, but just like any other protest group, the documentary is utterly one sided.

Yes totally misleading when the word wild was used which you didn't seem to mention.

gozunda

igCorcaigh wrote: »

Saw that. What is that grey goo?

I'd reckon its something similar to the industrial pinkish-grey stew concoction described in gorey detail by Grorge Orwell in his book 1984.

1641

Not all salmon farming is the same. It varies from huge highly intensive operations to organic farming which is (relatively) small scale. It is the same as with most agriculture.

Go in into most fish shops and they will probably have both varieties for sale. The organic is dearer but much superior in taste. Organic salmon must be certified.
There is more about it here: https://www.burrensmokehouse.com/blog/about/how-we-smoke-our-salmon/organic-salmon

Lady Haywire

1641 wrote: »

Not all salmon farming is the same. It varies from huge highly intensive operations to organic farming which is (relatively) small scale. It is the same as with most agriculture.

Go in into most fish shops and they will probably have both varieties for sale. The organic is dearer but much superior in taste. Organic salmon must be certified.
There is more about it here: https://www.burrensmokehouse.com/blog/about/how-we-smoke-our-salmon/organic-salmon

This is pretty much it in a nutshell. You get what you pay for & if you're going to continue buying the crappy farmed stuff, it will be continuously churned out to meet demand.
On occasion I buy salmon in Lidl, though I mainly try to buy organic salmon from a market. There is no comparison between the two, organic is sweeter, far more flavoursome & even has a nicer texture. The stuff from Lidl is what I'd flake into a salad where it's mixed with other flavours to buff it out a bit. Even ordered salmon in a restaurant recently & couldn't eat half of it, knew from the first taste it was the inferior farmed fish.

Thelonious Monk

Pretty sure its farmed in Ireland too. I used to like it but haven't eaten salmon in years. Fish farming is disgusting.

Harry Palmr

The farmed Salmon business has been under a cloud for decades. There was a massive lice and lice treatment issue in Scotland back in the 90s/00s and it's still continuing.

2004 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-salmon-scandal-they-tried-to-ignore-dh2730wng0d

2019 https://theferret.scot/pictures-diseases-farmed-fish/

Snow Garden

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Actually screw that this looks like the world's most toxic food...

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/photo-of-a-meal-served-in-a-limerick-hospital-branded-as-completely-unacceptable-38825253.html

Brought to you by Simon Harris in conjunction with the HSE.

The HSE are so so far behind the times when it comes to nutrition and recovery. It's not even funny. They waste so much money all over the system and yet totally scrimp on nutritious food which is vital for their clients.

Snow Garden

A man who used to work in the fish farming industry told me many years ago to stop eating farmed fish. Any farmed fish.
He said it used to be all small private operators when it started off but they are now owned by massive corporates and they only care about the money.

malinheader

To me There is no substitute for a wild salmon. Organic or not. Texture, taste, colour and the look of the fish is chalk and cheese. Feel sorry for people who think they are getting a proper salmon but unfortunately they are not and would find it hard to get a wild salmon now.

igCorcaigh

gozunda wrote: »

I'd reckon its something similar to the industrial pinkish-grey stew concoction described in gorey detail by Grorge Orwell in his book 1984.

It's people, isn't it.

igCorcaigh

I'll stick to the sardines.
Love oily fish.

Bogwoppit

malinheader wrote: »

To me There is no substitute for a wild salmon. Organic or not. Texture, taste, colour and the look of the fish is chalk and cheese. Feel sorry for people who think they are getting a proper salmon but unfortunately they are not and would find it hard to get a wild salmon now.

Yeah but it’s not the same product, you don’t compare farmed pork to wild boar.

Wild salmon should not be on anybody’s menu these days, stocks are way too fragile.

uck51js9zml2yt

Snow Garden wrote: »

The HSE are so so far behind the times when it comes to nutrition and recovery. It's not even funny. They waste so much money all over the system and yet totally scrimp on nutritious food which is vital for their clients.

By comparison,I was in the Mater private for a week and didn't want to leave when I saw the menu for the following day

malinheader

Bogwoppit wrote: »

Yeah but it’s not the same product, you don’t compare farmed pork to wild boar.

Wild salmon should not be on anybody’s menu these days, stocks are way too fragile.

Yes your right I suppose,but also fish farms had a devastating affect on the native salmon stocks so eating farmed salmon is also affecting wild salmon stocks in another way.

tayto lover

People trying to put me off my dinner again.
Vegan plot?

Thelonious Monk

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/just-three-or-four-in-100-wild-salmon-return-to-irish-waters-1.3875588

Natural salmon stocks totally f*cked in ireland too. I dont know how anyone can eat salmon these days. I wish the EU would come together and put a moratorium on most kinds of fishing for a few years to let it restock, like they did in Newfoundland after almost obliterating the cod stocks there.

dastardly00

What are people's thoughts on wild Pacific salmon in a can/tin e.g. John West

tayto lover

dastardly00 wrote: »

What are people's thoughts on wild Pacific salmon in a can/tin e.g. John West

Makes lovely sandwiches.

Thelonious Monk

dastardly00 wrote: »

What are people's thoughts on wild Pacific salmon in a can/tin e.g. John West

Much like pretty much everything in the world its f*cked and we shouldnt eat it

https://globalnews.ca/news/5802595/bc-salmon-stocks-plunge/

Snow Garden

malinheader wrote: »

To me There is no substitute for a wild salmon. Organic or not. Texture, taste, colour and the look of the fish is chalk and cheese. Feel sorry for people who think they are getting a proper salmon but unfortunately they are not and would find it hard to get a wild salmon now.

Organic salmon is a nonsense too.