FISH!

As many of you have already read, I have cut out dairy, red meat, chicken, artificial sweeteners, processed foods....from my diet. I am still eating fish and wanted to delve into the world of fresh caught vs. farm raised fish. I wanted to further investigate what's in the farmed raised fish that I may be eating. The world has a huge population of people but the amount of farmland has decreased, so we look to the oceans for our food. According to John Robbin's book "The Food Revolution" the number of fish caught in our oceans from 1950 to 1990 increased from 19 million tons to 89 million tons. But today that number remains around the same because our world's fisheries are seriously depleted. We are over fishing and 34% of all fish species are in danger of extinction.

Fish factories cannot fill their quota because the number of fish has decreased, so they are dropping their nets deeper into the ocean, pulling up smaller fish, sometimes using them to sell, but often discarding them, thereby taking the food straight out of the mouths of the bigger fish - basically sweeping the oceans clean and interfering with the food chain, and as a result fish are disappearing. Half of the world's fish caught is fed to livestock - Tyson's Chicken takes about 800,000 pounds of fish in a single netting with a $40 million super trawler to make its products and or feed to livestock.

Because of the decrease of wild fish and because we have such a huge population and so many mouths to feed there is a huge increase in fish farms. "Aquaculture" - def. from wikipedia (the farming of freshwater and saltwater organisms such as finfish, mollusks, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Also known as aquafarming, involves cultivating aquatic populations under controlled conditions and can be contrasted with commercial fishing, which is harvesting of "wild fish". Commercial aquaculture supplies ONE HALF of the fish and shellfish that is directly consumed by humans). All the catfish and rainbow trout, half the shrimp and 1/3 the salmon eaten today in the US are from fish farms.

Aquaculture has not really helped take the pressure off marine ecosystems. According to John Robbin's book, the farming of shrimp, salmon, trout, bass and yellowtail has actually put more demand on marine production in order to produce feed for the farmed fish. It takes 5lbs of wild ocean fish to produce a single pound of farmed saltwater fish or shrimp.

According to research from Stanford's Institute for International Studies " Aquaculture (aka: fish farming) is a contributing factor to the collapse of fisheries stocks around the world". Fish farming may cause fish low on the marine food chain such as herring, mackerel and sardines to disappear completely from the world's oceans.

Ok, as with factory farming, and we've all read how terrible the conditions are, the stress these animals are under and the crap that is given to them to eat - which we essential eat - are no different from the conditions in these fish farms! Parasites and disease thrive in the packed conditions of the fish farm and these diseases can be spread to the wild fish. The fish are in confined spaces which can cause stress as well as disease. Just like factory farming uses antibiotics and chemicals to fight off diseases in live stock, fish farmers also use chemicals to kill bacteria, herbicides to prevent plant growth in ponds, and drugs to fight off parasites and some fish farms use growth hormones and some are fed genetically modified corn. Up to 40,000 fish can be crammed in a cage, they cannot swim freely and farm raised salmon is given artificial pigments to give it the color that wild salmon have who get their "natural" pink/orange color from eating krill.

If you want your omega 3s from salmon - get it from wild salmon - farm raised has half the essential nutrients.

TAKE AWAY

Next time you are at the fish market or dining out, ask for wild, fresh caught fish, farm raised is not as good for you and aquafarming has a negative impact on wild caught fish, especially salmon. Do your research. It all seems to come back to the big business of the meat industry - in 1997 22 million tons of wild fish were caught and used for pig and cow feed!