Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences

Posted by CHB0403085482 6 days ago

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Comment by giov4 4 hours ago

funny, I tried to tell people and share with them about this salmon farming problem since many years, including quality, pollution, diseases and industrial feeding.

It is important to be aware of this and dont abuse salmon eating since imho some kind of risk is there, beside the negativity of its farming!

There are many documentaries online that show the core farming problem, it is interesting to see based on the article that this problems are becoming bigger and bigger and beside the lobbying hopefully there will be investments to solve it.

I'm surprised that a country like Norway and Norwegian people allow such abuse of the fjords and of the animal... but yeah I guess always same story, work for people, business, lobbying etc. if its oil, fish pig or cow the game is the same.

awareness is the first step, change is what is needed!

Comment by ksec 19 hours ago

1. The Title should be "Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences". It fits the character limit, why change it?

2. A lot of the conditions for Salmon farming can be drastically improved or completely eliminated if they have done it further away in deep sea rather than coast. It just cost more.

3. China is rapidly improving their Salmon Farming so there isn't much to worry about for Norway. In 10 - 20 years time half of it will be gone.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by reenorap 19 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Gabriel54 6 hours ago

Where are you getting this from? I've never heard this and I am a native speaker. Also none of the dictionaries I have access to mention this. E.g., one says:

> likely to have a strong or far-reaching effect; radical and extreme: a drastic reduction of staffing levels.

Comment by weard_beard 18 hours ago

The connotation of drastic always being negative is through common usage and not strict definition. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drastically

Using drastic in this instance is an appropriate, but rare, usage in a positive sense. You are correct that dramatic would be a more commonly used neutral synonym, but using drastic is technically just fine here. It is only slightly odd usage by common practice, but as a native english speaker I hardly noticed it until you pointed it out.

By using a less common word and outside of the common usage of that word, to my ear this adds emphasis, like reading the word in BOLD text or capitalized.

Comment by bryanrasmussen 16 hours ago

I think it is a very weird phrasing in this context

"drastically improved or completely eliminated"

because drastically often is a negative, improved often is a positive and increase, using a two word phrase were both words are essentially opposite of their common usage seems almost linguistic malpractice.

It would make much more sense to say either drastically decreased or dramatically decreased since the Or in the phrase indicates complete elimination.

Comment by satvikpendem 18 hours ago

Not really, as people in some dialects do so horribly/terribly improved. Drastic doesn't even mean bad per se, it just means extreme.

Comment by stymaar 19 hours ago

Points 2 and 3 kind of contradict themselves though, as China doesn't have access to deep sea (at least until the invasion of Taiwan or if China manage to take control of their claimed share of South China Sea).

Comment by ksec 18 hours ago

They are doing both landlocked and mobile deep-sea methods farming with success. In typical Chinese fashion as they have done with Fruit and other food productions, I wouldn't be surprised if they could scale it 10x within 5 years. I doubt it will take away Norway's supply to Japan in the short term due to quality and trust issues. But export to China may be lowered.

Comment by wahern 14 hours ago

You can farm fish outside territorial and exclusive economic zone waters. But in any event China has substantial EEZ waters: https://www.marineregions.org/gazetteer.php?p=details&id=848... Taiwan isn't much of a hindrance. For one thing, the Strait is 100 miles wide. And China's coast is much, much longer than Taiwan.

Comment by stymaar 5 hours ago

Check your map: with the exception a part of South China Sea that is a point of contention with Vietnam, China only has access to shallow water (For instance East China Sea is ~300m deep, which isn't significantly deeper than Norvay's Fjords).

On the contrary the eastern coast of Taiwan has access to very deep sea though.

(This is a well known geostrategic fact, as the small depths of Chinese water are a big weakness for their submarine fleet).

Comment by wasfgwp 4 hours ago

I assumed concentration is a bigger issue than just depth? If it’s done in open sea instead of fjords that also should be an improvement. Of course fish farming in entirely unprotected open sea waters might be trickier

Comment by wefzyn 17 hours ago

China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet, and Chinese vessels fish far beyond China's coastal waters like in South America, West Africa, Indian Ocean.

Comment by cassepipe 16 hours ago

That's an interesting fact but that does not tell me anything about the possibility it has of raising salmon in its own waters

Comment by voxic11 5 hours ago

Why would they need to do it in their own waters?

Comment by wasfgwp 4 hours ago

Because fish farms are generally stationary?

Comment by jurgenburgen 3 hours ago

Is it not possible to build a floating farm in international waters?

Comment by cassepipe 24 minutes ago

The point is that a pen far away from the land might not be very practical/much more expensive to take care of

Comment by Epa095 20 hours ago

It's interesting to see the power of wealth up close. For one the massive lobbying against any tax on the usage of the fjords(or on the wealth). But there is also cases where they will hire retired professors in tangentially related fields (like sea urchins) to write "scientific reports" "showing" whatever they want, which they then send to individual local MPs to convince them to allow more farming.

Comment by altacc 5 hours ago

The statement from the lobbying group is a classic example of PR deny, deflect, distract, confuse. The statement is basically "we're not the cause of the problem but if there were a problem we're doing everything we legally should so it's not our fault but we're also working to reduce this theoretical problem, which of course does not exist and isn't our fault".

The effects of salmon fishing in Norway aren't limited to the local communities, it influences the whole area, back to the county government. Politicians lose a lot of support if they go against the money because despite driving our electric cars to our cabins and loving going to walks in nature, us living in Norway really, really like the good life and don't want anything to impact that. (To be fair, this also applies to the majority of the planet's population.)

Comment by reco98gg 19 hours ago

I am surprised by the statement "Today, salmon sushi is a staple of Japanese cuisine"

While in Japan a few years ago, I found no salmon on the menu in sushi places.

When inquiring why, we were told that salmon is not that good, and that is more a food for kids than adults. Did it change or are we just one data point?

Comment by tecleandor 18 hours ago

I'm trying to recall right now, and maybe the only places where I didn't find salmon in any of my visits was in the more expensive/ fine dinning places (think ¥8000+ places). All the common kaiten sushi places, or chains like SushiZanmai have all kinds of salmon pieces. Different levels of fat, broiled, rolls...

Is it maybe a bit more like "comfort food", for kids, for less delicate palates, cheaper? Maybe. But truth is I haven't asked why I haven't seen it in the expensive places.

Comment by ramchip 2 hours ago

Salmon sushi is very popular, but it's not part of the traditional Edomae style (fish from the Tokyo bay), so the more upscale or traditional restaurants often don't serve it.

Comment by bogdan 4 hours ago

I've been last year and none of the 4+ Tabelog-rated sushi places I've been to had it. It was quite common in grocery stores though; sashimi grade was cheap and plentiful.

Comment by Animats 5 hours ago

It's a staple of Yelp restaurants. Yelp considers "fish" and "salmon" to be synonyms. Try to search Yelp for a place that serves trout.

Comment by dfxm12 18 hours ago

It's hard to say, depending on how far back your idea of "a few years ago" might be or where exactly you ate. After all, Japan has a lot of sushi restaurants and even different sushi styles. For example, you definitely wouldn't find salmon in an edomae sushi restaurant.

For reference, salmon was the most popular choice in conveyor belt sushi places 3 years ago. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01627/

Comment by tecleandor 15 hours ago

Ah, interesting stats, specially the second part when they say what type of sushi they refrain from eating. I guess that ōtoro and chūtoro is due to price. And uni... Maybe because of the flavor? It can be a bit of an acquired taste...

Comment by ramchip 2 hours ago

I think most people like uni, but it's also one of the most expensive sushi you can get at kaitenzushi

Comment by oblio 16 hours ago

I remember asking a Japanese chef in Japan, in 2019, and the answer I got was that sushi is much less popular in Japan than believed outside of Japan, and a lot more people eat rice and chicken, pork, etc., than salmon.

Comment by expedition32 3 hours ago

For thousands of years all Japanese people had was fish and rice. When countries become wealthy and open up to trade the population wants to eat exotic stuff. What Japan eats today would be nigh unrecognisable to cooks a hundred years ago.

Comment by sehansen 2 hours ago

Fish and rice isn't synonymous with sushi. Grilled fish, tempura-fried fish and soups with pieces of fish are all popular in Japanese cuisine.

Comment by gramie 19 hours ago

Recently there has been a push to farm "dry-land" salmon. In other words, the salmon live in large tanks on land, rather than in pens in the sea.

At the moment a company is trying to start one of these close to me. Some local people are opposed, some are supportive, but most just want more objective study and information (i.e. not performed/paid for by the company itself).

The devil may be in the implementation, but it certainly has some big advantages over the coastal pens.

Comment by concrete_head 16 hours ago

I'm no expert but that seems like it could be very energy intensive. All the systems to maintain water quality, temperature. Not to mention the problems that arise having fish in such high density.

There are other places in the world that farm salmon at a much lower density which helps in terms of disease and bioload on the environment. There's a company in New Zealand attempting to build open ocean fish pens, they might already have a prototype out already can't remember. Different species of salmon though.

Comment by gramie 15 hours ago

Energy may not be so much of an issue here in Quebec, where electricity is USD$0.05/kWh (residential rate) and 99%+ of it comes from hydroelectric power.

Comment by petterroea 19 hours ago

There have been critical articles about the lice problem in Norwegian newspapers for years, so it's honestly relieving to finally see it talked about abroad. I've felt shameful whenever people talk about the "superior Norwegian salmon".

Hopefully international attention is what it takes for change to meaningfully happen beyond some R&D.

Comment by teytra 2 hours ago

Solvable by using lasers!

Not "sharks with lasers" but "Stingray Laser system"

https://www.kvaroyarctic.com/the-stingray-laser-system-the-s...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6sGkVQUvW20

Comment by pvaldes 1 hour ago

This other problem is partially solved.

Comment by syoc 20 hours ago

Strange to have an article about salmon farming drawbacks without mentioning escaped salmons polluting the wild salmon population. There has been a strong decrease in wild salmon as they lose the ability to migrate back up the river to lay their eggs due to breeding with escaped farming salmon.

Comment by satvikpendem 18 hours ago

I suppose natural selection will act on those salmon that can't reproduce.

Comment by pjc50 4 hours ago

One possible outcome of that is the extinction of wild salmon.

Comment by pvaldes 1 hour ago

And, another could be to increase the populations of wild salmon

Dumber here is a feature, not a bug. The dumber the farmed escaped salmons are, the better.

Imagine 10 wild salmons swimming up the river to reproduce, 8 of then are devoured by bears. Only Rick and Jenny survive.

Now imagine the same salmons swimming up the river to reproduce, but joined by 40 farmed sterile salmons. And 8 of them are devoured by bears.

The reproductive success of the wild ones have increased, because security is in the numbers. Being easier to catch, bigger, clueless and extra-dumb, farmed salmons will attract the predators and more wild ones will reach the end.

Comment by pazimzadeh 5 hours ago

the farmed salmon were bred to reproduce and grow rapidly

Comment by kakacik 6 hours ago

I dont think thats the mechanism, otherwise there would be 0 effect on wild population. Farmed males spreading their genes must have some effect though, its not like they are automatically infertile due to just being farmed.

Similar approach works very well ie on tse-tse fly in parts of eastern Africa I've visited - introduce infertile/weak males into wilderness to effectively eliminate entire population in medium term.

Comment by obelos 20 hours ago

That is... unintuitive. Wouldn't the escaped salmon have to be able to get back upstream enough to where the wild salmon are laying/milting?

Comment by Hupriene 20 hours ago

I think the idea is that the migration instinct passed down by wild salmon is an epigenetic heritable trait. This trait is strongly selected for in wild salmon populations, but not in farmed populations. The constant influx of this maladaptive trait into the wild population is leading to an overall decrease in the ability of the wild population to successfully propagate.

Comment by mmaunder 20 hours ago

They’ve bred more docile salmon, according to the article. Getting that DNA into wild populations would be problematic I’d imagine.

Comment by Animats 5 hours ago

That's surprisingly easy. It's been done for chickens. All that was necessary was to put groups of chickens in cages, and keep only the cage groups that were the best egg-layers. After only a few generations, chicken-on-chicken violence was way down.

Comment by LoveMortuus 5 hours ago

>docile salmon

Hmm… that made me think of domestication, do you think we could ever have salmon as pets? What’s their character like? More like dogs or cats?

Comment by fragmede 10 hours ago

If those salmon are too docile, just give them cocaine.

https://www.science.org/content/article/cocaine-pollution-gi...

Comment by pvaldes 1 hour ago

This problem has been solved long time ago. Farmed salmons are sterile and can not reproduce, by design.

Jurassic park vibes here. I know, I know...

Okay, say the damned phrase and shut up.

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by hmottestad 20 hours ago

Don’t forget the dams and the humpback salmon.

Comment by DoctorOetker 4 hours ago

which salmon organs would contain most of say the heavy metals? they could be selectively cut out, and any below-regulation levels sold (domestically and abroad) can be seen as a free heavy metal remediation effort in those bays and fjords.

Making a closed loop system possibly including IMTA either on land (why not right at the salmon processing facilities saving transport costs and assets like boats, its cheaper to have no vehicle to maintain) or in water like the "Eggs" described in the article sounds like a no-brainer for the industry, who cares about 10x capex when the bottleneck is not capex but bureaucracy to get expansion permits? Once you realize capex is not the bottleneck (you can reuse the new system), it allows a lot of other costs to be eliminated, like disease and parasites: commingling fish with expensive health monitoring and management at density ρ can be replaced with smaller cells, each cell their intake and exhaust tubing, and the reservoir contact rate falls precipitously for the same density ρ: is the switchover investment more expensive than the current system? yes, but growth isn't limited by capex. This switchover would be desirable (true damage like the harmful fish feces concentration is prevented; false damage like bioaccumulating harmful heavy metals inserted by other human activities becomes none of the fish farmer's problems at all). The taxation excuses will dry up.

Comment by ionwake 3 hours ago

Did you use AI for this.

What on earth are you going on about?

My first suspicion was when you started taking about metals. Bro salmon are euryhaline.

You have no idea if its viable and profitable to remove certain organs, and its based on the incorrect premise that the fish have the metals in them, the ONE type of fish that has the lowest concentration of metals in existence. You literally picked the worst possible , weakest possible argument that could have existed, somehow defying all odds, ( which tbh is an achievement in itself) before your apparent non coherent jargon laden word ramble.

I need my coffee now.

Comment by giov4 3 hours ago

where do you see AI input?

for everybody, euryhaline: "Euryhaline organisms are able to adapt to a wide range of salinities."

how is that related to the heavy metals? and what's the reason behind attacking the post topic based on that? osmoregulation anything to do with it or what?

I still find the post useful and interesting, and I took organ modification as a possible threat to hiding toxicity instead.

It would have been more useful to explain why and make it clear for us too if thats hyped, instead of just bro'ing around :)

Comment by MichaelMoser123 17 hours ago

I think this is a veiled advertisement for Norway. Half of the world is engulfed in wars and terror (half across the road towards Mad Max), however Norway is worrying about the environmental effect of salmon feces on its fjords.

Comment by protocolture 14 hours ago

Eh foreign correspondent stuff like this tends to release at the end of a long pipeline. They spent 12 months on a piece on Israel that was focusing on the conditions of Palestinians near Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and it dropped a couple weeks after October 7, you could tell that they were pissed that it wasn't about Gaza, but were still happy to be in roughly the correct ballpark.

There other arm, 4Corners, did a piece about a big government construction project and IIRC there was a different prime minister when it released vs when they started the investigation.

Comment by Depurator 21 hours ago

A lot of interesting tech is being developed in salmon farming, and e.g. AI has been around for a long time. The north star is offshore farming in giant autonomus constructions far out at sea. Though problem but worth solving

Comment by beggi 20 hours ago

Is it though - I feel like the north star is on land farming. So many benefits. Offshore farming will exacerbate farmed salmon escaping and polluting wild salmon + parasites etc (land farmed salmon can generally be eaten raw or under cooked without being frozen without any worries)

Comment by pletnes 19 hours ago

There seems to be few offshore production facilities compared to on-land ones.

Comment by magicalhippo 6 days ago

Full title: Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences

Comment by bronlund 20 hours ago

I live in Norway and me and my family do not eat farmed fish - for multiple reasons; political, ecological, animal cruelty etc.

A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon. Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development. And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the feed, farmed salmon would be gray.

I could go on the whole day about this stuff. The whole thing is just sad.

Comment by Aurornis 19 hours ago

> A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.

Why would you think that? Ground beef typically has higher saturated fat than even farmed salmon and a lot less omega-3.

A hamburger adds a refined carbohydrate bun and sauces on top of that.

I think your political beliefs are overriding factual accuracy.

> And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the food, farmed salmon would be gray.

The color isn’t “fake”. It comes from Asataxanthin. Wild fish get it from food they eat. Farmed fish might get it from microalgae-derived sources. Why would it be “fake” if it’s the same chemical? They’re just feeding the farmed salmon the nutrients they need.

Astaxanthin is also sold separately as a supplement because people seek it out, too. It’s not some evil fake chemical dye. The wild salmon naturally eat it, too.

Comment by peder 17 hours ago

Absolutely valid to attack the political beliefs here. Farmed fish is somehow considered ecologically harmful but it's significantly less harmful than overfishing and allows for bringing extremely efficient, healthy food to the continental interior, which has the potential to reduce heart disease without medication.

It's so narrow-minded to treat farmed fish as some moral failing.

Comment by sdthjbvuiiijbb 5 hours ago

The Pacific salmon fisheries in North America are generally well managed. Overfishing isn't really a huge threat as a result. In fact you could argue that commercial wild salmon fishing is ecologically beneficial insofar as it brings resources and monitoring to the salmon populations and an economic incentive to keep them healthy.

When it comes to wild salmon (which are definitely under some threat) the far bigger issues are believed to be related to habitat. Dams blocking their transit and high water temperatures are two prominent issues.

Comment by aassddddssaa 16 hours ago

Sushi in the middle of the desert (for example in Las Vegas) is and has never been ecological sustainable.

Comment by dalyons 7 hours ago

Why not? It all comes frozen anyway. Not particularly different from any other food

Comment by eth0up 19 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by pibaker 18 hours ago

> Howdy, My ability to upvote comments was, for reasons unspecified, suspended. After a brief interaction with dang, it was temporarily restored. Then, again for unknown reasons, was suspended once again. So don't expect an upvote from me. I simply can't.

> Bravo, you spineless worm, salmon shill bastards.

And he wonders why.

Comment by eth0up 18 hours ago

Gee, you might want to look in the mirror of your own words: "upvote"

How would suppressing upvotes solve the occasional appropriately hostile comment to other hostile comments? That does not even make sense, just as the mythical demon burger you conjured from the dark depths of cognitive ineptitude, makes no sense.

I also happen to mention, in the trimmed parameters of your selective excerpt, that I rarely downvote. Suppressing the ability to upvote has no plausible such effect as you imply. Allow me to put it, gently, in perspective for you: Indolent Opportunism. Similar to your mythical hamburger creation. It's fine to hate hamburgers, but have some epistemic integrity on the side.

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by varjag 5 hours ago

I remember meeting a Russian immigrant who thought Norwegian sour cream was synthetic because it wasn't watery as the one she had at home.

Comment by klooney 8 hours ago

> Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development

Do farm raised fish still have elevated heavy metal levels? I figured that getting human controlled food would cut down on that.

Comment by BurningFrog 18 hours ago

On land we abandoned the hunter/gatherer system for farming thousands of years ago.

Because it just doesn't scale! It can feed 50-100 million people at most.

Maybe we need to empty the oceans of wild fish before we make that transition for seafood, but I hope it can happen a bit more quickly.

Comment by panarky 19 hours ago

> A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.

A sensational statement that is utterly false.

Per 100g, Norwegian farmed salmon has 0.1x the sodium, 0.5x the saturated fat, 2x the protein, 20x the Omega-3 fatty acids and infinity-x the vitamin D of your hamburger.

Farmed salmon is a minimally processed single-ingredient protein, while your hamburger is ultra-processed and packed with refined carbs, added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and chemicals synthesized in a lab.

> Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development.

Presumably you're talking about growth hormones?

Because that American fast-food hamburger has plenty of growth hormones.

Under Norwegian law and European Union/EEA regulations, the use of growth hormones in fish farming is strictly illegal.

Comment by learn_more 19 hours ago

cooked salmon and cooked ground beef seem to have similar amounts of protein per my cursory research.

Comment by undersuit 18 hours ago

A hamburger would have a bun at least. We're not comparing filets to patties... which could also contain additions like onion or egg.

Comment by eth0up 19 hours ago

Pardon, but how the hell is my hamburger packed with preservatives? And how, other than grinding, is it ultra processed, especially if the beef was given to me by a local rancher? I do not understand? And where the hell did the corn syrup come from? I never put Aunt Jemima on my burgers? Not even brown sugar.

Where in the

- Grass-fed beef

- Sourdough bun

- Lettuce

- Tomato

- Onion

Is all this stuff you cite? Any condiment in the known realm of terrestrial cuisine -- and even adult websites -- can be used on fish just as readily as a burger.

Comment by ricardobeat 17 hours ago

That’s not what “a hamburger” consists of for most of the population. I’d guess <0.1% of hamburger eaters are grinding their own meat and using sourdough. The average burger has preservatives on the bun, meat, ketchup, mustard, pickles, lots of sugar and other additives, a ton of condiments, and likely made of lower quality grain fed meat.

That makes “a hamburger is healthier than salmon” wildly incorrect as a generic statement.

Comment by eth0up 16 hours ago

Respectfully, allow me to make subtle, but not insubstantial correction:

"“a hamburger is healthier than salmon”"

to

“a hamburger is healthier than farm raised salmon”

That holds closer to the actual context.

I admit, the ultimate truth of whether a burger is technically healthier than farm raised salmon, is questionable. In my opinion, in either direction, but will concede that.

That said, had the parent stated that opting for a salad might be the healthier option, the argument of absent vitamin D would be a bit less compelling than it already is. One does not expect every conceivable nutrient from every meal. I do not support culinary dictatorship either, and for some, I remain convinced that a quality burger may, for some, be the healthier choice. But that was also not the premise of my argument. My argument was against the erroneous framing of "hamburger", to imply by decree of prejudice, that condiments and cheap bread define "hamburger". I have not been to a fastfood restaurant since the 1980s. I boycotted McDonald's as an 11 year-old. 'Billions Served' but not me.

For someone who wants to promote farm raised salmon, the argument against the parent could have been much more fair. And the fact that the parent was turning gray, compelled me to defend it with some measure of balance. And since I cannot upvote...

I will also address the anachronistic absurdity of ex post facto time-travel justice as indicated by the other comment -- I cannot be punished in the past for what I do in the future. By their own causal reasoning, maybe farm raised is not so healthy after all, as it appears to have potentially negative effects on one's reasoning capacity. It's 2026; we aren't time traveling quite yet... or, wait.. That really doesn't make sense. OK, I yield. It's time traveling. Burgers are bad. Farm raised salmon good.

Peace

Comment by fragmede 10 hours ago

Have you been to Mr. Charlie's?

Comment by eps 19 hours ago

Perfectly valid point actually, not sure why you are in gray.

Comment by eth0up 18 hours ago

Appreciated, and I apologize not to the target-audience for my other vulgar comment, but to yourself and anyone else who may disagree with me, but at least has the dignity to stand by reason.

One has to wonder why anyone would want to make such a comment invisible, as if they could not see it was already generally suppressed. That is essentially flagging. For a comment that made no false claim or insult. So while I am embarrassed for those who might defend me, I am not deleting my ugly comment. That is the type of comment that might actually deserve flagging, and it was also sincere.

Comment by onesandofgrain 20 hours ago

Astaxanthin for the color fair. What about the salmon is bad for pregnant women?

Comment by rsolva 19 hours ago

Fatty fish accumulates heavy metales and other unhealthy components and pregnant women in Norway is told to limit the intake. But it has been controversial, the industry is not happy with these recommendations!

Comment by Zigurd 19 hours ago

I can see this being sensible regarding, for example, swordfish, which is long lived apex predator. They get the bio accumulation of everything they eat. Farm salmon has a short life and a controlled diet. Where would they get heavy metals?

Comment by cassepipe 16 hours ago

From what I understand the fjord are relatively enclosed ecosystems and tend to accumulate stuff from the human acitivies around it

Comment by pletnes 19 hours ago

From their food and over time, I assume? Since farmed salmon is fed and live a short life I would also assume that it has lower pollution levels than wild fish of similar size and composition.

Comment by reenorap 18 hours ago

You are exactly wrong. Farmed salmon has very high levels of heavy metals and PCB because the water where they are farmed is slow moving accumulate pollution. Wild ocean fish swim in the open ocean where overall pollution is less. That’s why if you buy omega 3 tablets it needs to be from ocean fish otherwise you’re getting a high level of toxic chemicals.

Comment by geysersam 18 hours ago

Can you link to those recommendations? I can't find anything on the Norwegian public health sites specifically about farmed salmon.

Comment by rsolva 36 minutes ago

It seems public health recommendations where walked back after the controversy in the early 2010's, so it is not an official recommendation anymore.

Here are some of the studies and debates from back then:

- Chronic Consumption of Farmed Salmon Containing Persistent Organic Pollutants Causes Insulin Resistance and Obesity in Mice (2011): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

- Are environmental pollutants in the Norwegian diet harmful to children?: https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2017/02/perspectives/are-environm...

Comment by ndr 19 hours ago

I thought this was true for tuna and somewhat never registered it might be true for salmon too. I need to look this up and update, thank you.

Comment by anamexis 19 hours ago

Generally speaking, heavy metals accumulate as you move up the food chain, so it will be true for any large fish.

Comment by Aurornis 19 hours ago

> Astaxanthin for the color fair.

Why is it fair? Wild salmon also consume astaxanthin.

It’s like complaining that the farmers are bad for trying to mimic the fish’s natural diet.

Comment by throw-qqqqq 17 hours ago

Farmed salmon meat is pink, whereas wild salmon meat is white/greyish. A dull color.

They don’t put the coloring in the food to emulate natural food sources. They do it because it looks more appealing to most consumers.

Comment by rypskar 4 hours ago

The colour on wild salmon meat depends on the diet of the salmon, in the same way as for farmed salmon. All the wild salmon I have fished, even before salmon farming was big, have had red/pink meat since krill and shrimps are a large part of their diet in my area

Comment by pvaldes 2 hours ago

> wild salmon meat is white/greyish. A dull color.

You had not seen a lot of wild salmon, apparently.

Is called salmon color for something. Sea trouts are the fishes with whitish meat normally. Both wild and cultured trouts can have "salmon" colored meat when feed on a diet rich in carotenes.

All of this looks like the typical smear campaign online when Chinese need more time to develop some product.

And then, suddenly, the plague of videos of "electric vehicles" burning on a garage vanished overnight. And now we can purchase Chinese electric vehicles.

Comment by onesandofgrain 16 hours ago

I dont know what the fuck u r talking bout.

Comment by bronlund 20 hours ago

Growth hormones. It’s better now than some years ago, but still. Some claim the do not use them at all.

And they use a lot of antibiotics.

And there is some accumulation of dioxins and PCBs in the fat due to the feed, but this has also been approved somewhat.

Comment by ksec 19 hours ago

>Some claim the do not use them at all.

It is against the law in most if not all EU countries. It is also the dispute between US and EU agriculture trade.

Comment by throw-qqqqq 17 hours ago

FWIW, Norway is not a member of the EU - if that is what you are implying.

If that is not your point, I apologize, but then I don’t see the connection (maybe you could elaborate?)

Comment by masfuerte 17 hours ago

But Norway is part of the EEA and is therefore bound by many EU regulations.

Comment by olejorgenb 14 hours ago

Compared to most other meat production farmed salmon does not use a lot of antibiotics

Comment by wisty 5 hours ago

PCB contamination passed on from their fish meal in 2004, not sure if it's still an issue.

Comment by pvaldes 6 hours ago

The myth of the good savage strikes again. Animal cruelty is a such elastic term that I'm wondering why they don't use it still to make condoms.

Predators trying to eat you alive all the time, cannibalism, diseases making tunnels in your muscle, famine, acid water, contamination, environmental changes, noise levels that could make you crazy. If you have luck you reproduce once and then die of exhaustion and skin infections. If not, a bear eats you alive just when you were thinking in losing your virginity at 40 Yo, finally. Or a fishermen puts a hook in your eye, or in the mouth just for fun, pulls you out of the water and lets you suffocate slowly. Or you bang your head against a concrete wall. This is the normal journey of a wild salmon.

And this is NOT animal cruelty. This does not make you sad.

If you are on a crusade to remove animal cruelty, look at all this people living in Tokyo. They are packed like sardines in a can. But humans are gregarious animals, so it does not matter!. (They are happy!). Salmons on the other way are gregarious animals, so it is a big problem!. (They are sad!. They talk to me complaining!)

Is a problem, simply because it does not fit into our ideological vision of the world. An infantile paradise where salmons are nice little people with tiny hats that party with Pepa pig. They love bananas, football and to climb trees. (They must love it, because we do).

The idea that salmons are predatory fishes and would not mind to eat their siblings if they can catch them... don't like that. Protect me from the real world, pikachu.

Comment by freedom_dev 18 hours ago

"Sushi has been consumed in Japan for more than 1,000 years but the Japanese had historically preferred tuna, seeing raw salmon as parasite-ridden and unpleasant to the palette. "

English isn't my first language and even I know "palette" is wrong. Is it normal for official news outlets to write stuff like this?

Comment by sdthjbvuiiijbb 5 hours ago

>English isn't my first language and even I know "palette" is wrong.

The "and" in your comment implies that you think that being a native speaker should make someone more accurate with this. In fact it's the opposite. It makes sense that it sticks out to you as a non native speaker. Native speakers are less sensitive to the spelling of homophones (and this is true in many languages, not just English).

Comment by whyenot 18 hours ago

Maybe they are painting the fish and find the experience unenjoyable? :)

Comment by dwightgunning 18 hours ago

Perhaps a happy accident.

Comment by dfxm12 18 hours ago

No. Sometimes the spill checker just auto co-wrecks people.

Comment by thrill 17 hours ago

auto-erotics ... it was sitting right there.

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by Etheryte 18 hours ago

I'm sure you've never made a typo or mixed up two similar words before.

Comment by gtowey 18 hours ago

I'm a native English speaker and before your comment, I never noticed that palette, pallet, and palate are different words!

Comment by Ylpertnodi 4 hours ago

Comprehensive, or Grammar?

Comment by cassepipe 16 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_multi-trophic_aquac...

Comment by timonoko 3 hours ago

There is something fishy happening in Norway. Some Lapps suggested not to eat fish south of Nordkapp-island. Because of fish farms.

Insane, because this strait has always heavy current and nasty mælstrøms as half of Atlantic goes that way to east and back daily.

Comment by actionfromafar 21 hours ago

Maybe this is the future https://www.science.org/content/article/oceans-away-raising-...

Comment by bjelkeman-again 20 hours ago

Technically it works. Superior Fresh, as in the linked article, has a viable system. The challenge is that in the beginning it is hard to reach a scale that works economically. Added to that, in Norway it is challenging to grow leafy greens in greenhouses in the winter, compared to the latitude where Superior Fresh is located. It can be done, but is energy intensive. We ran a fully indoor pilot facility for five years in Sweden, it is still operational, under a new team. My ambition is to document what we learned in a CC licensed book. At the moment it is partially documented in a blog. https://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-par...

Comment by cassepipe 16 hours ago

The article does not mention land-based fish farms but instead the "egg", a more enclosed pen that is underwater but estimate that it is 10 times the cost of a pen. How would a land-based fish farm would compare economically to those innovative underwater sea pens in your seemingly educated opinion ?

Comment by mmaunder 20 hours ago

Salmon feed lots, with a similar problem of concentrated waste, cruelty and unhealthy animals. Sounds like the underwater egg solution they discuss in the article might also be solving an optics issue they have. Out of sight, out of mind.

Comment by aassddddssaa 16 hours ago

Two salmons can feed 5000 men. At least that’s the belief 20% of the US population has.

Comment by concrete_head 11 hours ago

I think you meant tuna not salmon. A large tuna can be 100's of kilograms, whereas a large salmon you are lucky if there is 10kg of edible meat

Comment by scns 5 hours ago

GP was talking about the story from the bible.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by YarickR2 16 hours ago

>seeing raw salmon as parasite-ridden and unpleasant to the palette.

Painting with salmon is a .. novel take on the art of food.

Comment by moomoo11 4 hours ago

why don’t we just infuse tofu with all the nutrients and eat that?

hell i would pay for that. high protein extra firm tofu is like 2.70/lb for me.

i get about 35g protein from 8oz of that tofu.

i eat salmon 2x a week but most of my diet is tofu and beans/lentils for protein.

i think it would be far ecologically and financially better to have tofu enhanced, so it meets nutritional needs at low cost.

and i personally find tofu a lot more flexible than any other food.

Comment by stinos 4 hours ago

If your goal is eating mostly tofu, sure. But one could also eat 'normal' meals (think food pyramid) from a varied diet including tofu and there'd be no need for nutrient-infused tofu and it would have a richer taste from more ingredients etc. And for most people, who don't even need to count proteins to begin with, supplies sufficient protein. Does take a bit more time to prepare though.

Comment by wasfgwp 4 hours ago

Because it’s not very tasty? Also hoper processed foods “infused” with nutrients don’t sound very appealing..

Most people (in western countries at least) don’t really optimize their food in take this way or want to maximize the amount of protein per $

Comment by matchbok3 21 hours ago

Some of these farms are truly impressive. Although balancing the health of the fjords is hard. People seem to prefer "wild" salmon but just like we don't eat "wild" cow anymore, I imagine in 30+ years it will be the norm. Hopefully we can shift to that norm in an environmentally friendly way.

Comment by throwup238 20 hours ago

We don’t eat wild cows anymore because aurochs went extinct in the last few hundred years.

People still eat junglefowl (ancestor of chickens) and wild boar (pig), but in the developed world domesticated animals are usually both cheaper and tastier.

Comment by rf15 20 hours ago

Addendum: People will probably read that as "au-rochs" (and wikipedia's IPA sure isn't helping here), but it's actually split "aur-ochs". (that latter part being the foundation for the current word 'ox')

Source: studied german enough to recognise that word root

Comment by 8100000000 6 days ago

[dead]

Comment by epolanski 20 hours ago

Would not feed it to my worst enemy.

Comment by fsuts 6 hours ago

Comes down to finances ultimately?

If can afford wild then get wild, otherwise farmed is cheaper.

No different to farmed animals or non organic crops. All three are maximised for growth rate and revenue

Comment by epolanski 2 hours ago

There's more than finances behind what you choose to eat.

Comment by medv 5 hours ago

> killed and slaughtered

then you see this kind of language you know what this article gonna be is about

Comment by SiempreViernes 4 hours ago

By the time you get to that phrase you are way past the middle of the article, so the fact you've read almost the entire article is probably the reason you know that it is about.

Comment by nope1000 5 hours ago

Cambridge dictionary defines slaughtering as

> the killing of animals for meat

So I guess "killed and slaughtered" would be redundant but not wrong.

Comment by emil-lp 5 hours ago

What it's going to be about, then?