Douglas Frantz & Catherine Collins. Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of our Favorite Fish. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022.

Many years ago, back in Portland, I had a neighbor who had a small pick-up truck with a bumper-sticker that said “Real Men Don’t Eat Farmed Salmon,” a statement I completely agreed with (aside from the sexism). Farmed salmon just do not compare to wild salmon when it comes to taste, especially if you are comparing a farmed Atlantic salmon to a wild Chinook or even Coho, both of which are still fairly plentiful in Oregon, especially if you catch them yourself, as I used to do. After reading Salmon Wars, I now have many more reasons to avoid farmed salmon other than just its taste.

In their book, the authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins document the industrial salmon farming industry, starting with its origins in Norway around 1970. The bulk of the book, though, is devoted to documenting the environmental costs of open pen aquaculture, where non-native Atlantic salmon are raised in pens anchored to the ocean floor close to shore and fed pellets made from smaller fish taken mostly from the coasts of Africa and South America, depleting local fishers’ stocks of fish in the process. The problems associated with this type of fish farming include polluting the waters surrounding the operation with uneaten food as well as fish waste; the use of chemicals and drugs to try to keep the penned up fish healthy; the frequent escape of caged fish which are then able to interbreed with local fish stocks, harming the gene pool in the process; the damage done to native fisheries, especially lobstering in Maine and Canada to its north; and the unaccountability of the industry, one which not only has the free use of its main resource, the sea, but is also often subsidized by governments trying to promote economic development. The authors to acknowledge the positive side—providing a mostly healthy food to a hungry world. But they seem to make the case that the cost of doing this is barely worth it.

But not all of the book is doom and gloom. The final few chapters cover a very recent innovation in farming salmon: land-based farms. These land farms, known as recycling aquaculture systems (RAS), raise fish in tanks that are fed clean water and a controlled diet that, in some cases, uses sustainable feed (no small fish, but instead a variety of other nutrition sources). There is no chance of fish escaping, and despite its higher initial cost, RAS fish mature in two years versus three for ocean pen fish, and have a firmer flesh thanks to constantly swimming against a current in the tanks. I was ready to confirm my reluctance towards eating farmed salmon never again until I reached the last pages. RAS farming is still so new that there is no general consensus on how to do it; as of 2021, there were multiple systems being tried, some more successful than others. There are even several RAS in Japan, although that is all I know about them, that there are some in Japan.

So who knows; perhaps in the next few years we will be seeing salmon labeled as RAS grown, in which case I would not only eat it, but eagerly support the brands as a environmentally conscious producers.