Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Posts: 91 Location: the paddleless glassbottom ark
salmon: up stream or down shit's creek?
excerpt:
Quote:
Is farmed salmon healthy to eat?
Increasingly, people are turning to salmon for a healthier diet.
However, much of the salmon available on the market comes from salmon farms,
and is not the celebrated salmon that originate in pristine rivers in British Columbia and Alaska.
Recent research shows that farmed salmon does not offer the same health benefits as wild salmon,
and that farmed salmon contains higher levels of PCBs and dioxins than wild salmon.
Is farmed salmon good for the environment?
As of May 2004, there were over 85 floating net-cage salmon farms operating in the coastal waters of British Columbia.
These floating feedlots produce the same amount of wastethe amount of raw sewage from a city of 500,000 inhabitants.
Read more about the environmental impacts of salmon farming.
Although the benefits of salmon have become a dietary given for millions of people,
this species is exposed to a number of toxic environmental chemicals particularly when raised commercially,
but the cause and effects were poorly documented until recently.
Research now shows that salmon and other fish take in chemicals present in their food,
which accumulate in fatty tissue over time.
These same chemicals are passed to and accumulate in humans who eat contaminated fish.
From this perspective, carnivorous fish such as salmon that feed high on the food chain can be especially harmful to health.
Penned fish are fed a diet of fish meal pellets and fish oil, but to add
one pound of weight a salmon must eat almost three pounds of fishmeal.
This high nutritional intensity equates with an equally high concentration of accumulated chemicals.
The mass "produced" salmon are of low genetic diversity, fed
additives and hormones often and are generally
"weaker" than the wild population of salmon,..quite often the captive salmon escape the tanks
or are simply released : which screws with the remaining
wild population of salmon,..
Quote:
Public and scientific outcry greeted the new policy.
"Hatchery fish and wild fish are very different in behavior and genetic variability," says Jeff Miller,
Bay Area Wildlands Coordinator of the Center for Biological Diversity.
"No credible scientist would support the idea of counting large numbers of hatchery fish
which are produced artificially in concrete rearing tanks, and then dumped in the estuaries,
bays and lower riverswhen assessing the status of wild fish stocks."
Joined: 26 Feb 2006 Posts: 108 Location: BC, Canada
All you have to do is eat some farmed salmon to see the difference.
It sucks. I never buy it anymore.
Sockeye, and Coho are the best. I guess for you it would be hard to get it fresh, but I imagine you could find canned and smoked salmon somewhere.
The worst part about the Salmon farms, is that they raise Atlantic Salmon in rivers systems that run into the Pacific.
Its freaking retarded. The Atlantic Salmon often carry sea lice, that has been introduced to the Pacific Salmon now, because of these farms. Its pure insanity. Really it was a bunch of Political Pork from the Department of Fisheries.
What they should have done is invested in helping to increase and facillitate the Salmon Spanws, or at least made the farms with Pacific Salmon. Its issues like this that really make me hate my government.
: 
which screws with the remaining
