Bon Appetit, Salmon Lovers
Seniors Choice Newsmagazine
September 2006
- By Rudy Loeser -
This piece comes to you from one who has been a lifelong fan of salmon. In my childhood in Germany, mother used to serve a delicacy called "Lachs", which, in the Yiddish idiom, became "lox" and sold as such in Jewish restaurants and delis throughout the western world. It was thinly sliced smoked salmon fillets preserved in oil and best eaten on a slice of rye bread, or a fresh salad or, on special occasions, in the form of smoked salmon with cream filling. Thank heaven, I still have the recipe for that in my kitchen library, although, for some strange reason that I shall investigate, smoked salmon slices seem to have disappeared from the shelves of the Okanagan stores.
This predilection for smoked salmon transferred itself into a liking of salmon as a main dish. On rare occasions, from outings with fishermen on the West Coast of B.C., I brought home a salmon fresh from the ocean. Coho, Sockeye, and the occasional Pink. Today there is always the Safeway store down the street, which carried the delicacy in its meat department displays. And this is where the dilemma began.
Beside the salmon pieces or fillets labelled "wild" were others labelled as "farm" salmon. We have all heard about, or read about, this industry that has thrived off the coast of B.C. for a number of years. I have always shied away from their product myself, as my instinct made me avoid a product that came from a very crowded environment (the fish pens) which, of necessity, were rife with fish feces and conducive to disease. I just didn't want anything to do with it, and I found that my instinct was right. Not only because of the reason I have just described, but a much worse affliction of farm salmon called sea lice.
Let me explain. There is the Broughton Archipelago, a stretch of our Pacific coast, which contains 27 salmon farms. Some of these pack more than a million fish annually. Unfortunately, those farms are situated in an area which is smack in the middle of the wild salmon runs which take the fish into inlets and up the rivers of B.C. On the way, they are affected by the epidemics of disease and feces that emanate from the farms.
Even though this , and other problems, have been reported in requests for cessation salmon farming, our government has not seen fit to comply - even though the government of the State of Alaska has banned salmon farms on its coast.
And it gets worse?
A couple of years ago, a fishing guide by the name of Chris Bennett reported seeing hundreds of baby salmon struggling to swim into the inlet in which they had been hatched and which their innate drive for survival demanded. He reported seeing hundreds of the tiny fish being eaten alive by sea lice. He collected some specimen and presented them to biologist Alexandra Morton. Ms. Morton went out into the fishing grounds and dipped up baby salmon and examined them and found that thousands upon thousands of those tiny fish were wrecked. They were bleeding from their eyes and their fins and they were not going to survive. The situation got worse in the next couple of years when 99 per cent of the Pink salmon run did not return to its hatching grounds.
Ms. Morton brought the matter to the attention of a Dr. Don Noakes, of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who undertook a very belated, (meaning after the run was completed) and offshore (whereas the run follows the coastline), sampling of the salmon and, surprise!, found very few samples of the louse population. Part of this, a parasitologist explains, was due to the fact that the trawl nets had scraped the evidence right off the fish, along with the scales. It is my assumption that Dr. Noakes still has his little sinecure with the Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans, much to the dismay of citizens of this province, and biologists like Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta, whose investigation has shown sea lice to be a threat to young wild salmon. Dr. Neil Frazer, a professor of Theoretical Geophysics has offered his belief that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is "in too deep with the industry".
Post script:
If you are also a lover of fresh salmon, and if your conscience runs that way, join me in a boycott of all farm-raised fish (all of which, by law, must be identified as such on the package). And now you know why farm salmon is cheaper than the wild kind. |
