Simen Sætre

The salmon you eat is all but certainly farmed, shot with dye so it comes out pink, and chock full of meds and poisons. There are almost no wild salmon to catch commercially any more, and a big part of it is precisely because of salmon farming. The industry is the pride of Norway, and has spread around the world, eliminating local salmon as it goes. We are rapidly approaching the days when farmed Atlantic salmon is the only salmon available. This grinding story is laid out in all its aspects by Semin Setri and Kjetli Ostli in The New Fish.

The authors are Norwegian journalists. They put six years into this book, visiting farmed salmon facilities in Norway, Scotland, Canada, USA, Chile – and seeing for themselves how Norway has inspired the whole planet to farm salmon. They’ve verified what they’ve been told, sought proof for claims, and expanded in every direction the story took them, following every lead to a conclusion. The result is a totally fair and evenhanded picture of where we are today and how we got here. It is far less than pretty. It is, at bottom, ugly hubris and playing God. The whole world is actually poorer for it – except for the fishfarming billionaires, of course.

In the 1960s, some Norwegians decided they could do salmon better. They tried cross-breeding them with trout and other fish, fed them this and that, and in general sought to increase their size while reducing the time it took for them to grow. Really quickly, they thought they did that successfully and were excited to start raising them in huge quantities in pens at the mouths of fjords, where their natural precursors passed on the way to and from spawning. There was no one to monitor it, much less regulate what they were attempting. The prospect of frankenfish never held anyone or anything back.

As with the domestication of any animal (including homo Sapiens), there were unforeseen changes they only found out about later. The new fish grew really fast, and far bigger than their wild cousins. This meant less time and money raising them. On the other hand, their flesh was gray not pink, and very unattractive in things like sushi. So vendors produced dyes, in a palette of pinks, whatever shade the farmer wants. Farmed salmon is faked right on the package. And then it gets worse.

It transpired the new fish were slow swimmers. This was not surprising since they were penned up their whole lives and never had to navigate a waterfall, rapids or an ocean. But when they started escaping the pens in huge numbers, scientists found out the hard way they had tiny, deformed hearts. No great concern in a pen perhaps, but these fish turned up dead at the seemingly the slightest exertion or even stress. Stress could be a change in water temperature or moving them around for processing. They all have elevated levels of cortisol. And the fatal Piscine Myocarditis Virus. Their Cardiomyopathy Syndrome causes massive blood surges all over the body, and the heart bursts.

And farmed salmon don’t communicate like other fish. Many say they appear to be deaf. One way or another, tens of thousands of dead farmed salmon turn up around seemingly all such farms. Norway alone reports 52 million salmon die before they reach harvest weight. Annually. And that doesn’t include young fry that don’t even make it to adolescence.

What becomes of all those dead fish? They become fishmeal to feed – the salmon. The stats are that 68% of all fishmeal in the world go to feed farmed fish, along with 88% of fish oil. Because salmon are predators. They eat smaller fish. Whole species of smaller fish are being wiped out in order to feed farmed salmon.

But the really big problem was (and remains) lice. Salmon lice had always been there, but fast moving salmon spread out over rivers and oceans avoided contact with them. In pens however, it was like – well – shooting fish in a barrel. Unbelievable numbers of lice cling to farmed salmon. They burrow into the flesh, leaving living salmon with great chunks missing and exposed flesh bleeding. The salmon sicken and die. Worse, the lice are now in such numbers they infect passing wild salmon too. The pens are a death sentence for all salmon, wild and farmed. Lice are the salmon farms’ largest product.

Not having projected anything like this (what could possibly go wrong?) farmers tried (and continue to try) everything. They scraped the salmon, put them in heated water or cold water – anything to loosen the grip of the lice. They tried all kinds of chemicals and poisons. For example, the entrance to fjords all over Norway now suffer the presence of 120,000 metric tonnes of hydrogen peroxide, which kills all kinds of crustaceans, but leaves the lice alone.

They tried cleaner fish – small fish that pick the lice off bigger fish. But the cleaner fish cannot live in the waters where the salmon are raised, and die out every time they are shipped in. They are now scarce as a result.

Farmed salmon are also physically deformed, with an entire menu of deformities in varying penetrations within the crop, from wavy spines to crooked mouths to misshapen hearts.

All the chemicals and poisons the farmers dumped on them made the salmon suspect for human consumption. Studies were undertaken. Yet in one remarkable study, Norwegian scientists found it to be perfectly safe for pregnant women. No ill effects at all. It turned out that was because they refused to feed the women farmed salmon. They ate wild only. The researchers said it was out of the question to give farmed salmon to pregnant women subjects. Far too dangerous. A most ridiculous study that proved the point better than anything.

As with cattle, getting protein from salmon is highly inefficient. More than half the cleared acreage in the Amazon goes for animal feed production, mostly soy. A salmon eats five meals of human food for every meal it gives us, the authors say. Salmon comes third after beef and pork in its outsized climate footprint. Even chicken turns in a better performance than salmon.

And yet, that is how Norway portrays it to the world – a miracle of sustainable farmed protein. Aquaculture is Norway’s gift to the future of mankind.

One of the biggest problems is the government of Norway itself. It is salmon farming’s biggest fan. It extols the virtues everywhere it goes. Its various government-sponsored organizations keep a tight rein on scientists, forbidding them to say anything negative about it. The government seems totally focused on aligning everyone’s enthusiastic support for farmed salmon. Millions of tons of it now ship to the world annually.

Even the authors felt it. Before the book came out, they published an article from it that wasn’t totally onside, or at least that was the way the government saw it. The criticism of them came from all corners of the country. The pressure was intense. Their credibility was shot. They couldn’t get interviews with anyone. Zero co-operation was the government’s game, and it had the power to implement and enforce it. The authors were messing with the saintly image of Norway, when no one was allowed to challenge it.

Meanwhile, wild salmon have a huge role to play on Earth, and eliminating them will bite back hard. Because wild salmon have all but disappeared. Salmon fishing seasons are being cancelled all over the planet. (One Norwegian salmon fisher complained that he finally got a tug on the line, but no fight. It turned out to be an escaped farmed salmon. It had no strength and no fight in it. He said it was like reeling in a plastic bag.)

The authors interviewed Alexandra Morton, who has been fighting the farming of salmon in the Pacific northwest and Canada for 40 years. She says “They head out to sea, drawing energy from the sunlight on the water, which causes plankton to bloom, which are in turn eaten by animal plankton, which are in turn eaten by the small salmon, who during their migration to the sea accumulate energy and then bring it back to the coast, where they also feed other species. Why care about salmon? If you breathe, you have to care about salmon.”

The book is absolutely wonderfully laid out. There are lots of photos demonstrating what the authors are talking about. The images of salmon festooned with lice as they swim around are unforgettable. So too are images of thousands of deformed and dead salmon. But they are counterbalanced by the stunning vistas of the coast of Norway, even if every fjord entrance is clogged with salmon pens. Each chapter is concise, dealing with some issue that would never have even occurred to most readers. This makes the whole thing a revelation. It is written like a newspaper feature, meaning it is a clear, swift read, easy to understand and powerful in its message. But it also profiles its human subjects so readers know their backgrounds and passions. It does it all and it does it well.

Towards the end, they quote some wisdom from people who had far more insight into how the world works than the government of Norway does. Here’s Walt Whitman: “It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” And John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

I can only hope The New Fish wins a rack of awards to put the silencers in government and the industry back in their place. And maybe save the salmon.

David Wineberg

(The New Fish, Simen Setri, Kjetil Ostli, July 2023)… (mehr)