Blog

Advances in aquaculture have made farmed salmon not just acceptable, but in many ways preferable to their wild counterparts.

Come dinnertime, wild salmon is an excellent choice. Many of the Pacific fisheries are well managed, and the fish itself is healthful and delicious. The problem is that there isn’t very much of it. Worldwide, our annual wild salmon harvest comes to about 2 billion pounds, which sounds like a lot until you divide it by 7 billion earthlings and come up with one serving per person per year.

In Seattle, there is an embarrassment of salmon riches, of course, but that’s not so nationwide, where many more people are looking to dine on our favorite fish. How to meet the demand in an environmentally sound way?

Go back as little as 10 years, and the answer was definitely not farmed salmon. “It was the thing you weren’t supposed to buy,” says Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which established the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to create sustainability standards for shellfish and fin fish aquaculture worldwide. When the industry was new, salmon farms were accused of polluting the oceans, spreading sea lice, fostering disease, allowing escapees and depleting the stocks of forage fish, up to 7 pounds of which went into each pound of farmed Atlantic salmon.

By 2004, the WWF, working with the industry, had started to develop detailed standards. “The industry had begun to make improvements,” says Clay. Nearly a decade later, in June of this year, those ASC standards — more than 100 pages of them — were released. Farms that meet the standards will receive ASC certification, and many already have begun the process…

View the full article at SeattleTimes.com.