Barbary Coast Dive Club Newsletter
Page 3The following is an article I read in a July ‘02 East Bay rag called The Monthly. I thought it was so good that I wanted to send it to people. Unfortunately newsprint doesn't scan very well so I had to type it out. I hope you readers will like it...
Fish Rap by Bud Hazelkorn
The Aquiculture Industry is serving up farmed salmon in huge numbers. But is this cultivated catch as healthy or healthful as wild salmon?
Every nutrition textbook promotes fish as a source of polyunsaturated oil "good cholesterol" and a couple of medical journals announced in April that eating fish once a week significantly cuts the risk of sudden death from asymptomatic heart disease. These studies plus the Jack-In-the-Box e-coli outbreak and mad cow disease have shot up fish orders at most restaurants and markets. People now approach hamburger with the same mortal trepidation as he or she does a new lover.
By contrast, everyone, it seems, loves fish. You can't but a diet book today without reading about the restorative properties of omega-3 essential fatty acids, found primarily in fatty, cold water ocean fish like salmon, mackerel, sardines, and herring. Rosie Daley, Oprah's favorite chef, recommends fish every other day, especially salmon. The omega-3s act as anti-inflammatories against autoimmune disease, build bones, stave off depression ("Prozac of the deep" some call it), steady the rhythm of the heart, and that's the short list. Unlike beef, which raises the risk of strokes, fish decrease it.
‘I can't buy enough of it', says Ted Iijima, fish manager a the Berkeley Bowl grocery, as he scours the pre-dawn San Francisco docks for salmon a week before Mother's Day. ‘Come winter, for the first time, I'm going to buy salmon that's been frozen during the season', he confides almost sotto voice. ‘ It's because of the public outcry. The people in Berkeley, especially, want to know, ‘Is this fish wild or farmed? How much mercury is in it? Does it come from polluted waters?' The season will be over, but my customers still want wild salmon'.
Unfortunately, wild salmon don't run all year and there's not enough of it to go around. But not to worry. In the era of the global marketplace and "Just Say Gimme", there is Plan B: fish farms.
More than half of the salmon Americans eat is farmed, that is , not hunted and dragged flailing from the sea but raised docilely in giant cages floating in the ocean, where they grow big and fast on high-protein diets, just like their feedlot and henhouse friends. ‘The demand is going to increase and the world's ability to produce commercially-caught fish has pretty much peaked', says Dan Swecker, secretary-treasurer of the Washington (State) Fish Growers Associations and also a state senator.'The increased demand is going to have to be supplied by aquiculture'-meaning farmed-"products".
Say he's right, and say it will. There's a little matter of its record. Much of the nutritional benefit of wild fish is lost in the farmed variety because of the artificial diets. Proximity to farmed salmon has led to rampant disease and decline among native fish in every part of the world except the Pacific Northwest...so far. Meanwhile, genetically engineered salmon awaits FDA approval, part of the vast, uncontrolled biology experiment in which we all are unwitting subjects. The dilemma is evident: To fill an extraordinary demand built on real need, the
Updated 8/12/02
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