Read Online 100 Million Years of Food by Stephen Le - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stephen Le
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drives us to the gates of Cookeâs hatchery. We step in and out of sterilization pools and scrub our hands with sanitizers repeatedly before entering. Salmon that are destined to be breeders swim in a spacious circular pool, with something of the leisurely atmosphere of a YMCA facility. Most of the salmon end up in outdoor, open-water pens for maturationâa highly controversial method, I have discovered.
We drive down to a small port and clamber into a boat with three Cooke employees. The boat motors out to a series of circular enclosures, a few hundred yards from shore. The nets of these enclosures hold thirty thousand to fifty thousand salmon per pen, depending on the size of the fish. Selectively bred to grow faster than wild Atlantic salmon, farmed salmon have been known to escape from their enclosures at certain facilities, through tears in the netting or accidental release into the surrounding waters during transfers. There are fears that escaped farm salmon could breed with local wild salmon, causing the gene pool to become weaker and pushing the wild stocks closer to extinction. In the outdoor pens, uneaten food and salmon feces drop onto the seafloor. One report estimated that the discharge of salmon feces into the Bay of Fundy from the aquaculture industry in 2005 was equivalent to the bowel movements of 93,450 people. 18
A mat of white bacteria thus gathers beneath the pens, polluting the water with sulfides and causing oxygen levels to drop; little except hardy worms may live in these toxic environments. In addition, the fish exist in such crowded conditions that they are more easily infested with sea lice parasites, causing unsightly blemishes. Since blemished flesh is shunned by customers, fish farm operators are compelled to treat the sea lice outbreaks with pesticides, which can be poisonous for nearby animals such as lobsters. The sea lice may also transfer infectious salmon anemia, a disease that can be fatal to salmon and has wiped out huge stocks of farmed New Brunswick salmon in past years. When the province paid out compensation to fish farm operators like Cooke, there was a public outcry against the misuse of public funds. Opinions among fishermen and Native groups are complex: some of them decry the pollution and competition from salmon aquaculture operations, but others work in the industry itself and rely on aquaculture for steady incomes. The controversy over salmon aquaculture is most vociferous in North America, particularly the Pacific Northwest, which has the largest concentration of salmon pens; in Chile and Norway, governments are more lenient toward salmon aquaculture, and there is more space available for salmon farming operations, easing tensions and increasing profitability.
Although salmon aquaculture is new, aquaculture was known a thousand years ago to the Chinese, who raised carp in ponds, a practice that spread to Europe in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, basa and tra fish are raised in Southeast Asian ponds. Carp, basa, and tra are suitable fish to raise in ponds because they eat a broad variety of foods, including plant foods and human wastes, enabling recycling of valuable nutrients. Catfish have the same potential, and many are farmed in the States. All these fish, however, are challenging to export to Western markets because the fish have a muddy taste in their flesh, and the numerous small bones of carp make them difficult eating for people unaccustomed to the chore of picking out bones. On the other hand, once you develop a taste for carp and basa, they can be addictive. As I learned from living in China and Vietnam, Chinese people revere their carp, steamed or fried, bones be damned, and the Vietnamese simmer basa in soy sauce with ginger and garlic until it becomes pleasantly caramelized; the fat of the basa fish leaves a pleasant feel in the mouth alongside a dish of rice, never mind that these fish may have been fattened on human excrement in fish
We drive down to a small port and clamber into a boat with three Cooke employees. The boat motors out to a series of circular enclosures, a few hundred yards from shore. The nets of these enclosures hold thirty thousand to fifty thousand salmon per pen, depending on the size of the fish. Selectively bred to grow faster than wild Atlantic salmon, farmed salmon have been known to escape from their enclosures at certain facilities, through tears in the netting or accidental release into the surrounding waters during transfers. There are fears that escaped farm salmon could breed with local wild salmon, causing the gene pool to become weaker and pushing the wild stocks closer to extinction. In the outdoor pens, uneaten food and salmon feces drop onto the seafloor. One report estimated that the discharge of salmon feces into the Bay of Fundy from the aquaculture industry in 2005 was equivalent to the bowel movements of 93,450 people. 18
A mat of white bacteria thus gathers beneath the pens, polluting the water with sulfides and causing oxygen levels to drop; little except hardy worms may live in these toxic environments. In addition, the fish exist in such crowded conditions that they are more easily infested with sea lice parasites, causing unsightly blemishes. Since blemished flesh is shunned by customers, fish farm operators are compelled to treat the sea lice outbreaks with pesticides, which can be poisonous for nearby animals such as lobsters. The sea lice may also transfer infectious salmon anemia, a disease that can be fatal to salmon and has wiped out huge stocks of farmed New Brunswick salmon in past years. When the province paid out compensation to fish farm operators like Cooke, there was a public outcry against the misuse of public funds. Opinions among fishermen and Native groups are complex: some of them decry the pollution and competition from salmon aquaculture operations, but others work in the industry itself and rely on aquaculture for steady incomes. The controversy over salmon aquaculture is most vociferous in North America, particularly the Pacific Northwest, which has the largest concentration of salmon pens; in Chile and Norway, governments are more lenient toward salmon aquaculture, and there is more space available for salmon farming operations, easing tensions and increasing profitability.
Although salmon aquaculture is new, aquaculture was known a thousand years ago to the Chinese, who raised carp in ponds, a practice that spread to Europe in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, basa and tra fish are raised in Southeast Asian ponds. Carp, basa, and tra are suitable fish to raise in ponds because they eat a broad variety of foods, including plant foods and human wastes, enabling recycling of valuable nutrients. Catfish have the same potential, and many are farmed in the States. All these fish, however, are challenging to export to Western markets because the fish have a muddy taste in their flesh, and the numerous small bones of carp make them difficult eating for people unaccustomed to the chore of picking out bones. On the other hand, once you develop a taste for carp and basa, they can be addictive. As I learned from living in China and Vietnam, Chinese people revere their carp, steamed or fried, bones be damned, and the Vietnamese simmer basa in soy sauce with ginger and garlic until it becomes pleasantly caramelized; the fat of the basa fish leaves a pleasant feel in the mouth alongside a dish of rice, never mind that these fish may have been fattened on human excrement in fish
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