Please Don't Eat Farmed Salmon

Salmon is big business on Chiloé. The top export commodity from this island archipelago, salmon is also one of Chile's major cash crops, besides copper and wood and out of season fruit. Unfortunately, farmed salmon is bad news for the fragile marine ecosystems here, and probably not so great for your body when you eat it.

Let me briefly describe what I've seen of "las salmoneras" thus far in my time here: everywhere you look in beautiful little secluded bays and inlets between islands and peninsulas there are arrays of white pontoons lined up in the water floating net pens that are ringed by fluorescent orange buoys. At many aquaculture sites, a barge floats nearby with noisy machinery on board and a series of big black tubes that are apparently "harvesting" the fish - sucking them out of the water and into the hold of the barge, to be processed. Onshore, an endless stream of big trucks run up and down the dusty roads, carrying huge loads of nets, machinery, and dozens of stacks of big 6 foot plastic tubs full of dead fish. All night long, the salmonera in the bay just offshore from Sergio's house is at work, with a clanking, suctioning noise of the barge and superbright floodlights interrupting what otherwise would be a silent night in which the only sounds are frogs chirping and waves lapping the sand.

I'll spare you the details of what they feed these salmon, and what they do to keep them healthy in their cramped, unnatural pens, and what they dye them with to make them look pink like wild salmon. Needless to say, I've unfortunately had to avoid swimming in the contaminated water, which is not only full of these chemicals and hormones and antibiotics, but also saturated with super high concentrations of fish feces - imagine a sprawling factory farm feedlot for beef cattle, but think fishy... yum!

If you want to know more about this issue and what you can do to ensure that sustainably caught wild salmon is available in a store near you, check out Farmed and Dangerous - a great campaign run by the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform. They've got enough info to make you quit farmed salmon faster than you can say Omega-3!