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Comment by X86BSD | Hacker News Reader

This is appalling. As an avid fly fisherman, these farms are disgusting. You can see how sick these fish are at the local costco. They put the farm raised salmon fillets right next to the wild salmon fillets. They are pale pink compared to the vibrant rich red of the wild.

These farmed salmon exist in this huge pen of netting, where they swim in their own filth and spread disease amongst each other and any wild salmon swimming through the filth that washes out from the netted pens. It hurts and damages the wild population as they spawn and swim through this sickness and get sick.

I wish they were banned personally, but if humans are not smart enough to not buy this sick farm raised salmon then we deserve to have salmon wiped from the earth.

It's such a shame.

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Most of this is handwaving. The color of the fish has nothing to do with it's health; it comes from certain materials in the diet. Moreover, farmed salmon has lower prevalence of parasites: https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/d755kx/almost-every-...

The farmed salmon require constant medication to combat the parasites that thrive in dense populations of confined salmon. The wild salmon, however, do not benefit from the medication, but do pick up the parasites as they swim past open-net salmon farms. This is one of the many reasons why Pacific commercial fishermen are opposed to open net salmon farming specifically, rather than just to salmon farming in general; it is not just competition, it is literally destroying a species we depend on, and the ecosystems that depend on them in turn.

Sorry about the lack of a citation, I found out about this while handling tons of infested salmon over several summers, not by reading a study. Last I heard, a study was commissioned by the DFO, but the results were kept private by the BC government; communications by government sponsored scientists were tightly regulated, beginning during premier Gordon Campbell's time in office.

According to the internet (always reliable), the natural pink color of wild salmon comes from their diets. The most natural diet for farmed salmon would make them gray, and that wouldn't have anything to do with their health, just the fact that they'd be eating different things. But people won't buy gray salmon, so farms include a pigmenting agent to give them color.

Yes, it's from the crustaceans in the natural diet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astaxanthin for background on natural and synthetic forms of the pigmentation.

I don't eat meat, but watching a documentary on sea lice in farmed salmon made me lose my appetite for everything. Getting a little queasy just thinking about it.

So kind of like flamingoes, then?

How do they remove parasites from sushi and poke fish?

Sushi grade fish is frozen at a specific temperature for a specific time period to kill parasites.

Also, there is no such thing as sushi grade.

In the USA. Sashimi (sushi is the rice) is never frozen in any decent restaurant in Japan, so the question remains unanswered...

If you find this is because it was farmed fish and farmer fish can't have this type of inner parasites that cause trouble. Although is true than can have more load of external parasites in skin or gills they are super-clean inside normally. Much cleaner than wild fishes.

I bet that most, if not all, decent restaurants in Japan ultra-freeze wild fishes on the other hand, even if they may not admit it.

My understanding is that for many fish species, the fish are caught well offshore on multi-day fishing trips. They are put on ice immediately, otherwise they return to the docks with spoiled fish. Think "The Perfect Storm".

> I bet that most, if not all, decent restaurants in Japan ultra-freeze wild fishes on the other hand, even if they may not admit it.

They (can, in some restaurants or if you ask) serve the head next to the sashimi and it is still twitching so you know it is fresh. So no, they don't.

So the parasites don't exist in Japan or they don't affect people who eat them?

> The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has issued an official warning on the rapidly growing number of Anisakis infections linked to eating raw or undercooked fish. [...] The ministry urges consumers to keep the fish frozen below minus 20 degrees for at least a day, or heat it for at least for a minute in temperatures exceeding 60 degrees, which should kill the larvae.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/12/national/scienc...

Here's the tool that's used to determine how much pigment to feed farmed salmon:

https://www.dsm.com/markets/anh/en_US/products/products-solu...

> people won't buy gray salmon

Isn't that called trout?

Different species....

but not by much.

I was making a (perhaps poor) effort to raise a point about arbitrary classification of food species. King Salmon and Atlantic Salmon are different species too, but why do we call them "Salmon" but we call Steelhead "Trout"?

>Thy are pale pink compared to the vibrant rich red of the wild.

Meat colour can be deceiving (at least for land-based mammals).

Eg - Some American supermarkets treat meat with carbon monoxide to keep it bright red for days.

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/why-supermarket-meat-...

Edit - apparently farmed salmon are given pigments mixed with their feed to make their flesh more pink : https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color...

>if humans are not smart enough to not buy this sick farm raised salmon then we deserve to have salmon wiped from the earth.

Spoken like a true capitalist.

The free market provides. And the free market taketh away.

fish farming salmon is interesting as it turns a large quantity of less desirable wild fish into a small quantity of more desirable salmon.

i.e. if people just ate the inputs directly then there would be more food for less environmental impact.

This is how it works with cows too. And to a lesser extent, pigs. And to an even lesser extent, chicken.

All meat by and large has a much worse impact on the environment per-calorie than vegetarian diets.

What is this called.. trophic entropy?

The laws of physics must be obeyed.

Many (certainly not all) cattle are fed diets of plant material that is inedible for humans, and that was grown on land that is not suitable for other crops with minimal to no fertilizer usage and no irrigation. The cows themselves are raised on similar land.

Such cows are raised in a much more sustainable / efficient manners than others, and the important tradeoffs are independent of whether they are "organic" or not.

I've never seen product labeling that reflects this, and it makes me sad.

From my understanding of the economics of the majority of US beef cattle, they are fed a diet composed largely of corn and soybeans, which grow on land that could otherwise produce varieties of the crop edible to humans. They are grown in CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operafion) lots and produce huge amounts of waste. This is in contrast to the more 'expensive' grass fed cattle that does indeed eat plant matter otherwise indigestible to humans. Our food system is designed to produce food in massive industrialized systems that trend heavily towards requiring massive inputs and producing massive waste outputs.

Pigs are the ultimate recyclers, and we'd really not want to eat their inputs in much of the world. Have some organic waste? Well, feed it to the pigs!

As an aside, the Coptic christians in Cairo stopped collecting trash because the government slaughtered all their pigs, leading to a huge garbage crisis in the city.

Cows and sheep graze on marginal grassland that is unsuited to agriculture. Most countries aren't like India and suited to vegetarianism. Tibet would basically not exist without meat (and Tibetan Buddhist are specifically not vegetarians accordingly). The Inuits could never make a go at it in the arctic as vegetarians.

NYC used to have pigs too.

https://qz.com/1025640/hogs/

> Pigs are the ultimate recyclers, and we'd really not want to eat their inputs in much of the world.

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet

Cows have a rumen. You can feed them a diet that is almost entirely sawdust and they will do just fine.

Or newspaper waste: http://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2017/3/Fe...

I don't know many humans who eat grass!

Or you know, we could just catch and eat all the wild salmon instead.

Farming is not the problem. Unsustainable farming is the problem. We can raise and kill and eat animals humanely (oh irony), just as we can grow food sustainably. The problem is that knowledge is not evenly distributed...

The planet can only support so much inefficiency. Humans are eating too much meat for our population. No animal farming is sustainable at this rate.

If people filled up on more plant-based foods and had a little meat for flavor we would have much less of these kinds of problems.

There is a fair chance that 'vibrant rich red' of that wild Salmon is actually the vibrant rich red of farmed Salmon fed food with carotens.

I've never seen actual wild Salmon whose flesh you could describe as 'vibrant rich red', it would be more of a hue somewhere between orange and pink. But I have seen farmed Salmon with that over-bright and saturated color.

I have never seen farmed salmon with any vibrant reddish color. They always look pale pink.

>these farms are disgusting

Commercial fishing has absolutely devastated our oceans. Farmed fish have long been proposed as the "sustainable" solution.

If commercial, open water fishing or fish farming isn't the solution to provide sustainable food, then what is?

Sustainable commercial open water fishing is completely acceptable to everyone, surely?

The local Coast Salish natives have been successfully farming oysters and other shellfish in the tidal zone for thousands of years. This actually improves the nearby environment by filtering the water, and sequesters carbon in the CaCO3 seashells. We could probably scale this up safely, if the DFO is still capable of regulating anything effectively.

We need to repair the DFO, the gutting of regulatory agencies is a root cause for many of these problems.

Sardines and other smaller fish are generally far more sustainable than the types of predator fish that humans have been pushed to prefer. There are also sustainable rates of fishing but our current economy doesn't work to incentivize this aside from the labels and NGOs approvals that go on certain seafood products.

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