A Fish Story

I love fresh salmon. The first winter after we moved here I went to a local Pescaderia and inquired about the delicious looking salmon side on the ice. "Wild Chilean" he said, so I bought it. Each February and March I have purchased good looking salmon from the same guy and it's always the same story. Only one problem: It's 100% wrong! I won't even try to guess if he intentionally lied or if he himself didn't really know.

While engaged in a thread about GMO foods and chicken production I started looking for info on salmon farming. Farming fish has many of the same problems as farming poultry such as disease, bad diet, antibiotics, etc.. except for one thing; when farmed fish get sick they can infect wild stocks.

I won't get into the differences in food value/health benefits between farmed and wild salmon. You can easily find this information and more about the horrors of farmed salmon by using Google. However, I will share some interesting things I learned:

1. There is NO COMMERCIAL HARVEST OF WILD CHILEAN SALMON. The wild stock were depleted years ago. There is still a sport fishery.
2. Chile is one of the largest producers of farm-raised salmon in the world, it may soon surpass Norway who is #1.
3. The farmed Chilean fish are ATLANTIC SALMON. Why? Because they learned from the Norwegians and still get their eggs from Norway.
4. The largest commercial harvest of wild salmon occurs in the northern Pacific from San Francisco to the Aleuteian Penninsula in Alaska.
5. There is a very small commercial wild fishery in Norway.
6. There is no commercial fishery of wild Atlantic Salmon in the US or Canada.

Bottom line is this; the salmon we get here is farmed fish from Chile. I have seen Alaska Salmon at Costco in the fall. I won't knowingly eat farmed salmon. I guess I'll be waiting until fall. Dang, I was looking forward to that "Wild Chilean Salmon" next month.

Newfoundland and Labrador is the only province in Atlantic Canada in which commercial salmon fishing is allowed.

Not according to the Fisheries and Oceans Canada website. The lastest catch report data is for CY 2010 which show no Salmon harvested.

David:

Does Costco MX carry the bags of frozen wild caught Alaskan Salmon? We often rely on that during the off season here in Albuquerque.

I've not looked but I will. I've only bought fresh salmon there. Are the bags full of filets or ??

The Copper River are filets but some of the other options are steaks. Here we generally have four or five options including steelhead.

If you can buy Copper River salmon in Mx it is wild and probably really expensive. The steelhead is farmed. For that wild salmon experience, try and find (the new fish shop perchance) frozen sockeyes, etc. and thaw them in the fridge. I will not eat commercially farmed fish. Garbage/trash in, garbage/trash out. Ever made homemade Gravlax? You'll need lots of fresh dill.