DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Environmental Working Group’s report that farmed salmon contains PCBs is just the latest development in a trend. It’s been a tough year for the salmon farming industry. Let’s review.

In January, the European Union issued limits on the amount of the chemical compound canthaxanthin that can be added to poultry and salmon feed. Canthaxanthin is a pigment that’s sold as a feed additive and chemical tanning agent.

If canthaxanthin is so safe that companies sell it over the counter in pure form as a cosmetic, why would the EU ban it? Because it’s not as safe as everybody thought: it causes crystalline deposits in the retina. The EU knew this since 1997; the data is given in the minutes of their 107th Meeting of the Scientific Committee for Food. It just took them five years to act on the findings.

Why would fish farmers add a chemical pigment to salmon feed? Because farmed salmon isn’t naturally pink, but grey: farmed salmon is dyed pink because nobody would buy gray salmon. Salmon farmers pick a dye color just like you’d select paint, from a chip chart called a SalmoFan.

In April, Seattle law firm Smith & Lowney filed lawsuits against three major US grocery chains: Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, demanding that farmed salmon be labelled “artificially colored.” Among other useful resources, Smith & Lowney’s salmon-dye lawsuit website shows a picture of a SalmoFan.

In May, all three grocery chains agreed to label farmed salmon as artifically colored.

So now, with the new labels in place and the publicity from the lawsuits, consumers are becoming aware of the risks of chemical additives in farmed fish. But there’s more to the story.

A November, 2000 report entitled Farmed and Dangerous: Human Health Risks Associated With Salmon Farming [PDF; 184k] details some of the problems. For example, antibiotics fed to fish lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant disease in humans.

A February, 2003 report entitled The Hidden Costs of Farmed Salmon (also available as a 511k PDF) details additional problems. For example, “it takes nearly two and a half pounds of smaller fish to raise one pound of farmed salmon — reducing the amount of seafood by 59 percent.”

Which brings us back to the latest gill-net threatening the salmon-farming industry, the EWG’s PCB report. Here are a few key findings:

• Seven of ten farmed salmon purchased at grocery stores in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon were contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
• If farmed salmon with the average PCB level found in this study were caught in the wild, EPA advice would restrict consumption to no more than one meal a month.

It’s like the mercury-in-the-tuna problem… you might think that by eating salmon you’re doing something healthy, when fact you’re poisoning yourself, unless the salmon was caught in the wild. It is regrettable that this is happening, because there are probably nontoxic ways to raise salmon commercially. There’s just been no economic incentive to do so. Not until now, anyway.