The Trouble with Eating Fish Today

Since then, setbacks have varied: Farmed salmon production exceeded the amount of wild-caught salmon in 1999; nearly 3 million Atlantic salmon reportedly escaped from farms in British Columbia, Washington, Maine and Scotland in 2001, the same year infectious salmon anemia forced Maine salmon farmers to slaughter over 1 million fish.

From the traces of illegal antibiotics found in an Asian shrimp farm in 2002 to the gross violations of the Clean Water Act in a Maine-based salmon farm in 2003, and certainly the toxicology tests revealing farmed salmon to be one of the most toxic foods in the world — more than five times more toxic than any other food tested — clearly the industry as a whole has some explaining to do.

The guidelines for clean-eating seafood are the same for everyone as they are outlined for pregnant moms: Fresh-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring and anchovies are your best bets in regard to healthiest seafood. Some people might think farmed fish must be the healthiest and most environmentally responsible choice, but in many respects, fish farming, aka aquacultured fisheries, aren’t much different from the land-loving CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations.

One of the worst problems is salmon pens placed next to wild salmon runs, which seriously threatens the viability of wild-caught salmon, especially since the farmed variety are often carrying diseases such as infectious salmon anemia virus, and that’s just one of several.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

Threats to Fish Farming Culture

A Timeline of U.S. and World Aquaculture indicates that the multimillion-dollar fish farming industry began, no doubt, with the very best intentions (like feeding people), but as with arguably every other global enterprise, problems occur (and continue to occur) that are as varied and unpredictable as your average fishing expedition. Some highlights:

Carp were farmed in China in rice paddies and freshwater ponds as early as 3500 B.C. Egyptian hieroglyphics show tilapia being rounded up into aquacultures, with Japan joining the ranks in 2000 B.C.

The first real fish farming as we know it may date to the 1400s, when Indonesians trapped young milkfish in coastal ponds when the tide was high. True modern-day methods may be traced back to a German farmer who gathered trout eggs, fertilized them, then nurtured the hatched fish to maturity.

Then in 1853, a trout farm in Ohio became the first official fish farm in the U.S., as it was the first to artificially fertilize its fish eggs. The concept grew to similar endeavors in New England in the late 1800s to raise lobsters and flounder, and Idaho for trout in 1909.

Franklin D. Roosevelt even had a farm pond program in which the concept was encouraged and federal subsidies offered for farms willing to build and stock fishponds. Similar operations began in the Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, Norway and Scotland by the 1960s and, by 1985, Australia.

No one could have predicted some of the problems: Sea lice caused the collapse of an Irish Sea trout fishery; Alaska banned netpen fish farms, shrimp farms collapsed worldwide due to disease; British Columbia placed a moratorium on new salmon farms to conduct an environmental review; and Canadian researchers procured a patent for transgenic (aka genetically engineered or GE) salmon. And that was just in the 1990s.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com