After writing about farmed fish in Scotland, it’s amazing how many more articles about fish farming around the world started popping up – all around the question of whether farmed fish is environmentally sustainable.
The first article I came across was from The Australian newspaper (18 Dec 2010), and once again the scary comment from the Australian aquaculture industry is that they’re replacing fish meal with other sources – mainly poultry, lupin and canola meal plus here’s a quote from someone in the industry: “we can raise them [the fish] on high levels of grain and they do just as well as on high levels of fish oil”. So now we’re feeding the fish with chicken (which was probably fed corn or soy) plus pellets made with grain, which, as the reason is trying to reduce the cost of the feed, will probably end up being corn or soy. Either way, chicken or grain is not a natural food for fish from the sea!!!!
Then there was Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary (plus Daily Mail article, 15 Jan 2011) that talked about prawn farming in Bangladesh with the lack of control on pesticides used to control disease and farm locations adjacent to sewage outlets. Besides those problems of fish farming, who knows what they are actually feeding the seafood…
Next came an article by Heston Blumenthal in The Times newspaper (20 Jan 2011) all about some trout farmer in South Wales that Heston thinks is truly fantastic because since the fish industry is looking for alternatives to fish meal, this farm is feeding their fish on ragworms. But the real shocker is in the next paragraph – he feeds the ragworms on soy protein. Not only is that bad enough but Heston then goes on to state “which has health benefits and is far less damaging to the fragile aquatic food chains”. I don’t think so – not only is soy bad for health but introducing it into the food chain is extremely damaging to the fragile human food chain…
There goes that omega ratio flip again by pushing the omega 6 level way up high for a food we’re being told is a great omega 3 source… It’s scary how our whole food chain is becoming contaminated with soy and corn!
That creates a dilemma for me – I want to eat wild fish but I don’t like the idea of the other fish being thrown away because there’s no market for that variety.
So, how about creating the market for fish meal for feeding the aquaculture fish? Then all those ‘other’ fish can be used for the farmed fish. That then helps everyone plus the food chain…
Let’s kill two fish with one stone…