Page 124 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

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FARMED FISH: YAY OR NAY?

ou can think of a typical fish farm much like a cattle
feedlot: Too many creatures crammed into too little
Yspace and fed too much sub-optimal feed, making them
too sick and fat. Tens of thousands of rapidly growing fish
swarming amid net pens or ponds. Ergo, fish farmers relying
on the usual Band-Aid solutions—antibiotics, pesticides, and
other chemicals—which round out the CAFO (confined animal
feeding operation) analogy by similarly contributing to antibi-
otic resistance and environmental degradation. But instead of
in factory farms on land, it all transpires under water.

MORE REASONS NOT TO EAT FARMED FISH:
Fish out of water. It’s harder to maintain a hard border, so to speak,
when you’re housing living things in a body of water. Imagine
large cages made of netting, floating offshore. Inevitably, fish
escape, at least in the case of farmed salmon, which is a par-
ticularly problematic type of fish farming. This can result in
the spread of disease as well as fish acting as invasive species
in these waters where they don’t belong. They can even mate
with wild fish, which can mess with the genetics of the wild
population.
Less healthy fish. When fish are confined, they’re less active. The
result is fish who are fatter than their wild cousins, who get tons
of exercise and live off small fish and krill (little crustaceans).
For us, this means farmed salmon develop up to three times
the saturated fat of wild salmon (much like the comparison
for grass-fed beef). This high saturated fat content is caused by

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