An update from my hometown paper:
Farm-raised salmon, a popular fish in American supermarkets, is so contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals that people should eat it no more than once a month, a new study says.When I lived in Vancouver, I developed a pretty severe addiction to fresh, wild, Pacific Salmon. The Granville Island Smokery makes some of the finest smoked fish you can hope to find on this planet. And the owner, a feisty little German grandmotherly lady, is a total hoot. (Yes, I did buy ridiculous amounts of fish there. Pity they don't ship south of the border anymore.)The 14 chemicals studied, most of them pesticides, all are banned in the United States. But they can linger for decades in the environment and in the human body, and are present in the smaller fish that are ground up and fed to salmon raised in giant ocean cages.
Wild salmon have much lower levels of contaminants and are safer to eat, the study found.
Now, the other shoe drops. Not only does farm raised atlantic Pink salmon taste bad, but it's bad for you to boot.
So, if anyone can point me to a political action committee that's focused on trying to preserve the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest (everything north of the Columbia River, including the Fraser river and the rest of BC, thankyouverymuch), I'd be much obliged.
The report found that farmed fish in European countries had the highest toxic load. Salmon farmed in Scotland topped the charts with the highest level of PCBs and dioxin, and supermarkets in Frankfurt and Paris also carried the most toxic catches. Chile had the least tainted of the farm-born fish. Many fish farms raise a species called 'Atlantic salmon.'
Bah. We have Salmon once a week.
Re:Salmon
ziggy on 2004-01-09T20:27:35
The Inky had a more domestic version of this report. It talked about PCBs in the range of 20-50 PPB, and addressed the issue of what's a "safe level" of PCBs - the FDA says 2,000 PPB is safe, while the EPA says ~5 PPB is safe.So, either this is a non-issue -- farm raised salmon are at 1% of the FDA safe level -- or it's a big issue -- farm raised salmon are 5-6x the EPA safe level.
One thing is clear: it's politics all the way down.
