What kind of salmon are you eating?  Thomas May, a writer we’ve met at trade shows, wrote an article entitled, Farmed Salmon Found Higher in Pollutants, which says don’t eat salmon raised in ocean net pens because their diet of concentrated fishmeal pellets contains high levels of toxic chemicals which may pose a health threat to humans.  In addition, those farm-raised salmon (also called ‘Atlantic Salmon’) don’t get the same exercise the wild critters do, and are flabby with the wrong kind of fat.  Studies show Atlantic salmon don’t have the healthy omegas their natural counterparts do.

Farmed salmon samples tested showed 10 times more contaminants, most notably polychlorinated biphenyls than were detected in wild species.  Scientists traced contamination to the feed from bait fish trawled from the world’s oceans in vast quantities by industrial fleets.  Concentrating the nutritional value of these fish into pellets fed to farmed salmon also appears to concentrate toxins.

Farmed salmon is 50-60% of the world salmon market; it was 1% 10 years ago. And the number of fish farms (5,000 world-wide from Norway to Thailand) is expected to double in the 2 decades.
The canned salmons we carry state on their labels that their salmon is “caught in the pristine waters of the Gulf of Alaska.”  Our smoked salmon is wild, not farm-raised.

When you buy salmon or eat salmon in a restaurant, ask if it’s Atlantic salmon (farm raised).  The more we agitate, the greater the awareness, the greater the possibility for change….