INTRODUCTION

Every trip to the grocery store presents a dilemma. Which cereal do you buy? Are the chickens that laid the eggs really cage-free? What about trying that new plant-based meat? A hidden problem awaits at the seafood counter, though, when considering salmon.

This might seem surprising. Consumers have been told that salmon is a healthy and environmentally friendly food. Doctors recommend eating salmon for protein, nutrients, and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. The U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests two servings of fish a week. The salmon’s packaging may show a fish leaping upstream in pristine rivers and boast that it is a certified-natural product: “organic,” “sustainable,” “naturally raised.” Sure, there are many salmon choices and little information to help consumers choose from among them, but shouldn’t any fillet you buy be just fine? What’s the problem?

To start with, in almost every case, the salmon in front of you spent its life in a cage and the marketer’s claims are false. “Organic?” There is no USDA-approved definition of organic salmon, so that term is misleading at best. “Sustainable?” When farmed, salmon are carnivores raised on a diet heavy in small wild fish ground into meal and oil, which makes salmon inherently unsustainable. “Naturally raised?” Nothing is natural about feed laced with chemicals and antibiotics or fish swimming in crowded, parasite-plagued cages for two years or longer. Outside the alternative reality of marketing, the slabs of reddish flesh at the seafood counter have nothing to do with pristine waters or muscular salmon navigating upstream and everything to do with the industrialization of food in today’s world.

Now, few Atlantic salmon remain in the wild anywhere. Rivers that once saw tens of thousands of returning fish currently count returns in double or single digits, even though groups like the Atlantic Salmon Federation and the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization are working against heavy odds to restore salmon and their rivers. Look at the fine print on the label of the Atlantic salmon in your local market and you may see that it is farmed—if you are able even to find a label that identifies the origin of the fish. In fact, 90 percent of the salmon consumed by North Americans is farmed Atlantic salmon, raised in feedlots floating on the ocean and flown in from Canada, Scotland, Norway, and Chile; the remaining 10 percent is mostly wild-caught Pacific salmon from Alaska, one of the few places where wild salmon are still fished commercially.

We didn’t always eat farmed salmon; we used to have a choice. There was a time when wild Atlantic salmon was known as the “king of fish.” Ice Age humans painted images of salmon on cave walls in Dordogne, France. Caesar’s legions brought the taste for salmon back to Roman markets. In North America, salmon was a principal food and cultural icon for Indigenous people, and it sustained early settlers from Europe. For millennia, millions of Atlantic salmon migrated three thousand miles from the freshwater rivers of what is now the northeastern United States and eastern Canada to the western coast of Greenland, where they fed and matured for years before following Earth’s magnetic fields, their own genetic coding, and a strong sense of smell to return to their precise river of origin to spawn and create new generations. Variations on this journey were repeated across Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia, creating a sustainable food source and an enduring wonder of nature.

So, what went wrong? Why do we find ourselves eating unsustainably farmed salmon?

There are many culprits in the king’s demise. Beginning during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, waste was dumped directly into rivers and streams, and the seemingly inexhaustible stocks of salmon began to decline across Europe. By the mid-1800s, numbers were reduced further by commercial fishing and the construction of dams and mills that destroyed habitats and blocked salmon rivers. Within another century, and because of these continued activities, salmon that once numbered in the millions were nearly extinct in Europe and parts of Scandinavia—foreshadowing the disappearance that has left the rivers and streams of New England and Atlantic Canada nearly empty of salmon today. In recent decades, the climate crisis has warmed the oceans and rivers, industrial and municipal pollution has poisoned waterways, deforestation and chemicals like DDT have spoiled habitats, and intensive overfishing has decimated wild populations. And in the past forty years, a new threat emerged in the form of industrial-scale salmon farms in fragile coastal regions along salmon migration routes. The primary means of farming salmon is in large cages suspended in the ocean, known as open-net farms. Once seen as a means of taking pressure off overfished wild salmon, these farms turned out to pose a new, man-made danger.

As wild Atlantic salmon disappear, these floating feedlots have made salmon one of the world’s most popular and inexpensive fish and have created a twenty-billion-dollar global industry. In Asia, North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe, what was once a luxury in restaurants or reserved for special occasions at home is eaten at millions of meals a day; a decade ago, salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish in the American diet, second only to shrimp in seafood consumption.

But availability and cheapness come at great cost. What you consume today is not your parents’ salmon; instead, it is bred to grow fast, raised in crowded pens, and fed a diet of dried pellets made from smaller fish and grains and laced with chemicals. Industrial-scale farms in coves and bays off the coasts of Norway, Scotland, Chile, and Canada harbor millions of salmon in cages. The only barrier between the cages and the environment is a net that allows the ocean to flush the pens. Excess feed, chemical residue, and fecal matter form a layer of slime on the seabed below the farms, smothering marine life and plants. Parasites and pathogens proliferate in the crowded cages and spread disease to wild fish. Hundreds of thousands of farmed fish escape each year, competing with wild salmon for habitat and food and interbreeding to produce hybrid fish too weak to survive.

Quite simply, the rise of salmon farms demonstrates the hubris in, and the price to be paid for, transforming a natural biological process into an industrial operation. And so, your choice at the seafood counter may be much more fraught than you thought—and it definitely matters.

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A few years ago, and like most people, we regularly bought farmed salmon without giving much thought to its origins. We had read about the health benefits of salmon and other oily fish. Catherine had grown up eating Atlantic salmon caught by her father in eastern Canada. We knew that what we purchased at Costco or Whole Foods was not the same fish brought home by Catherine’s father, but it was what was available and, surely, it must be fairly healthy, we thought. There was no way to question where that fish came from or to test its healthiness, was there? When we moved to Paris, we were fascinated by the fishmongers who noted the origin of each fish and the way it had been caught or harvested. We saw that there was a more informed way to put fish on our plates. Could we do that in North America? What were we doing instead? We didn’t linger on these questions long.

Then, on a Sunday afternoon in January 2020 in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, a small coastal community a few minutes from our home, we went to a public meeting. A neighbor had sent us a notice that a group called the Twin Bays Coalition was holding a session to discuss plans by two multinational companies to locate more than twenty large open-net salmon farms along the coast of Nova Scotia. Nearly thirty years earlier, we had seen a single small salmon farm create a dead zone on the seabed in front of Catherine’s parents’ home on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. The prospect of more farms was worrisome, and the warnings we heard in the crowded hall from environmentalists, lobster fishers, and ordinary folks reinforced our concerns.

We decided to do some research. We are curious, persistent, and skeptical, characteristics developed through many years as newspaper reporters, investigators for the U.S. government and law firms, and authors. But it did not take long for us to discover that the threat from the proposed salmon farms was bigger than we imagined, that the province’s picturesque coastal waters would be at risk, and that the area’s valuable lobster industry and dwindling number of wild salmon would be endangered. The idea for this book began to sink in.

We found scientific studies showing that, for all its promotion as a healthy source of protein and fatty acids, farmed salmon contains residues of pesticides and other chemicals that pose risks to humans, particularly fetuses and young children. What we learned about untreated waste was just plain gross. According to a study in 2003 by a coalition of advocacy groups known as the Pure Salmon Campaign, the average salmon farm contains around 800,000 fish in twelve cages and produces fecal matter roughly equivalent to a city of 65,000 people. A 1989 study of Norwegian salmon farms estimated that the organic waste in the fjords that is generated by the production of 150,000 tons of fish equaled 60 percent of the waste generated by Norway’s total population of 4.7 million people; today, Norway produces more than six times as much farmed salmon, and a lot more waste. Sewage and other waste cause far-reaching damage to the environment, contaminating the seabed and nearby marine life. A city must treat its sewage, but the farms dump the excrement and excess feed on the seabed. Waste beneath farms turns the ocean floor toxic, consuming oxygen needed by marine life and dispersing contaminants through the water. A 2014 study in Scotland found a reduction in biodiversity up to two hundred yards away from salmon cages; other studies described wider impacts on marine life and wild salmon. A single photograph on the internet sealed our commitment to this project: a yardstick plunged into the seabed beneath a salmon farm showed an accumulation of feces and excess feed reaching the thirty-two-inch mark.

For the next two years, we worked to understand the impact of open-net salmon farms on the health of the planet and its people and to delve into the inner workings of the oligopoly that controls the market and the quality of what ends up on our dinner tables. What we found was a new Wild West created by globe-straddling salmon-farming companies that operate outside meaningful regulation. The more we dug, the more the salmon-farming industry began to seem like a combination of Big Tobacco and Big Agribusiness. Just as cigarette manufacturers spent decades discrediting critics and concealing research, Big Fish employs counter-science and public relations campaigns to undermine scientists and environmentalists who challenge its practices and products. Just as agribusiness turned to hyperintensive farming of cattle, chickens, and pigs on land, salmon farming exploded from small operations to industrial-scale feedlots on water. This unchecked expansion occurred because regulation remains weak and because governments tend to promote salmon farming at the expense of the environment and the health of consumers.

Humans aren’t the only ones being harmed by the status quo. Farmed salmon face their own staggering health risks from disease, parasites, and predators. In Norway, the government reported that 52 million fish died before harvest in 2020; the previous year, the figure was 53 million. In Scotland, the mortality rate for farmed salmon quadrupled between 2002 and 2019, according to government figures. In 2019 in Newfoundland, more salmon died in cages than were harvested. Norway and Scotland are the only salmon-farming countries that release mortality statistics, but estimates are that between 15 and 20 percent of all farmed salmon worldwide die each year before they can be harvested. By comparison, the U.S. National Chicken Council reports that its average mortality rate is 5 percent, and cattle feedlots average 3.3 percent.

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Getting farmed salmon to the world’s tables does not have to be this way. We found innovators raising Atlantic salmon in land-based, closed-containment facilities where chemicals and antibiotics are unnecessary and where there is no threat to wild salmon. Studies show that consumers are willing to pay a premium for products raised or manufactured without damaging the environment or endangering their health. Land-based salmon farmers are trying to leverage that sentiment into a market for a more environmentally friendly and healthier product. Challenges remain for this disruptive new technology, but it offers hope for the future of the industry—perhaps the only hope. But just as the auto industry fought mandatory safety innovations like seat belts and air bags, Big Fish resists the logical transition from ocean-based farms to cleaner and safer land-based operations.

This book is about what happened when the king of fish was dethroned and an industrial usurper took its place, degrading the environment and risking our health. The narrative takes readers from the origins of modern open-ocean salmon farming in the fjords of Norway to the shiny tanks in a pioneering land-based plant in southern Florida, from the industry’s marketing hype to the dystopian vision of salmon farms below the waterline. We show how the collapse of a single farm in Puget Sound led to a ban on salmon farms in Washington State. We take readers to the rocky coast of Newfoundland, where three million caged salmon died in a single incident. We travel to the front lines in the battle between the open-net industry and a colorful resistance movement, describing an international struggle that has profound economic, regulatory, environmental, and health implications. Finally, our book charts the way forward toward a salmon industry with the capacity to feed the world responsibly—because the technology and the innovative solutions are out there.

Millions of people rely on fish for protein. The salmon they eat needs to be safe. For too long, the salmon-farming industry has wrapped itself in a cloak of virtue, asserting that it is feeding the world and putting healthy food on our tables while discrediting the science that paints a contrasting picture—and resisting the only viable way forward. This book shows what is happening and what you are actually eating—and how both could be much better. We hope the stories and hard data in these pages will inspire a movement toward a better way of producing healthy, sustainable salmon.


SALMON WARS. Copyright © 2022 by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.