Eat this....

[x]

How to turn 5 fish into one....or less.

Hmmm. Doesn't sound like a deal you'd jump at, even after having a few too many. Most of us can spot a con a mile off and will have nothing to do with it. But there are some very insidious schemes being worked on us right now and most of us don't notice it.

Take fish farming. Like many enterprises, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. However, the right way is not always the cheapest way to do it. So it gets done other ways.

Most of you have doubtless heard that it takes about 5lb of food to manufacture 1lb of farmed salmon, or 'frankenfish', as I prefer to call them. If you ever see a fresh wild salmon next to one of these travesties of genetic engineering, you'll know what I mean.

Normally, if you were in a supermarket, would you be happily reaching for the GM food? Probably not. Filling the trolley with stuff that was loaded with red dye? Grabbing a basketful of a food laced to within a hairs-breadth of the legislative limit on Dioxins, PCBs, heavy metals, pesticides and growth promoters? I think not.

Let's approach the issue from another point of view, then. If and when you pick up a can of tuna, do you check if it's marked as being 'dolphin friendly'. Most people, it appears, do. It's the biggest marketing tool the canned tuna industry ever hit on and they know it. OK, it saves a few dolphins, but it's hell on the tuna, let me tell you. But we tend to focus on the fact that the product is 'environmentally sound', for some reason.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) on it's website at
http://www.irishhealth.com/index.html?level=4&id=9646 advises that certian groups of the population limit their intake of tuna and other large predatory fish such as shark, marlin and swordfish because these fish are long lived and accumulate significant quantities of mercury and other heavy metals etc.

The FSAI stresses that everyone should continue to eat one or two portions of fish per week, including one portion of oily fish such as salmon, as part of a healthy diet.

All good advice. Or is it? We're advised that tuna may contain pollutants, so limit our intake of it. In the next breath, we're advised to eat salmon. Now, I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist but I do know that the vast majority of the salmon sold in the high street is farmed. It's fed on a diet of fish meal, supplied by the pelagic trawling industry to the processing plants and so to the fish farms.

Now, a little arithmetic. If we have concentrated the feed and it takes five times the weight of 'raw material' to make one measure of the 'end product', what happens to all the pollutants that the 'raw material' contained? Yes, you've guessed, it's now concentrated in the farmed salmon. Isn't multiplication easy?

I personally like my pollutants in unconcentrated form; I feel it limits the medical risks a bit.

So, having ascertained that farmed salmon is not really such a healthy choice, what other downsides are there? Going back to the feed, lets take a closer look at what it is and where it comes from. Most of the fish meal originates as herring, mackerel, scad, sardine and similar oily fish. These are caught in truly vast quantities by our domestic pelagic trawler fleet, and indeed boats working much more distant shores, courtesy of various private or EU agreements with various countries.

The fishmeal and oil industry, which started in northern Europe and North America at the beginning of the 19th century, was based mainly on surplus catches of herring from seasonal coastal fisheries. This was essentially an oil production activity; the oil finding industrial uses in leather tanning and in the production of soap and glycerol and other non-food products. The residue was originally used as fertilizer, but since the turn of this century it has been dried and ground into fish meal for animal feeding. In fact, one definition of fish meal is that it is a solid product, ground, that has been
obtained by removing most of the water and some or all of the oil from fish or fish waste. Various process may be used, depending on the original oil content of the raw material, but basically a process of heating, pressing or centrifuging, liquid sepearation, water reduction, drying, grinding and
processing into pellet form.

Salmon fed solely on this concentrated diet have a vey pale flesh, almost grey, in fact. The feed lacks elements in the wild salmon diet, foods such as shrimp and krill that contain naturally occurring pigments. You are, after all, what you eat, even if you are a fish.

So, some time before slaughter, our farmed salmon is dyed. The artificial pigments fed to salmon are canthaxanthin and astaxanthin. These manufactured additives are a synthetic version of natural pigments
in the same family as beta-carotene. The pigment canthaxanthin (E161g) has been linked to eyesight problems. EU Scientific assessments have shown that a high intake of the additive produces an accumulation of pigments in the retina, affecting sight. As a result of the scientific evidence, the EU has cut the maximum amount of canthaxanthin allowed in farmed salmon by at least two-thirds of its original permitted levels.

Last year, a food safety alert was issued to all European countries over organically farmed salmon that contained malachite green. Malachite green, which acts as a fungicide as well as a dye, was banned from
use because it was suspected of causing cancer. All in all, the actual feed is a pretty unhealth brew so far.

Any butcher adding dye to spruce up unappetising meat would quickly find himself in court, yet salmon-farmers choose their required tint from a graded shade-guide.

[img]http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/272/01salmonfandb1.gif[/img]

[img]http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/6389/3salmonrh0.jpg[/img]

Residues of the now-banned insecticide, di-chlorvos, have also been discovered in farmed salmon. The Pesticide Residues Committee recently found the pesticides DDT, chlordane and hexachlorobenzene in 97%
of the seventy-nine farmed salmon they tested.

To ensure his stock of farmed salmon concentrates on growth rather than on reproduction, our cheerful frankenfish farmer prefers to rear all-female stock or sterile fish. These are produced by manipulating the maturation times of young fish. Hormones (steroids), chemicals, pressure shock or x-ray bombardment are the methods used. Hungry yet?

Antibiotics cure an expanding list of fish diseases, some new to science. Because the antibiotics used in salmon farming are identical to those dispensed in doctor?s surgeries, ingestion of penicillins, tetracyclines, sulphonamides etc. contained in farmed salmon could contribute to both allergic reactions and antibiotic resistance in the population as a whole.

Farmed salmon are fed unnatural diets, very high in oil content, hence are four times fatter than wild salmon. One farmed sample examined had seventeen times more fat than its wild Pacific counterpart! 20% of bodyweight can be fat. Hardly healthy fare for the weight-watcher or the diet-conscious.

Imagine if you read the 'ingredients' on a pack of farmed salmon flesh and it read like this:-

Ingredients:

White fish
Flesh dye (Canthaxanthin)
Blood meal
Magnesium sulphate
Hydrolised feathers
Iron oxide
Meat bone meal
Zinc sulphate
Cane molasses
Potassium iodide
Fish oils
Sodium carbonate
Soya
Zinc oxide
Antioxidants
Di-calcium phosphate
Yeast
Copper carbonate
Herring offal
Cobalt sulphate
Saithe offal
Cobalt carbonate
Binders (cellulose, alginate)
Optional; antibiotics, pesticides, diseased fish

Tasty, yes? But you won't see that on the packet......but it's all in there. Remember, we are what we eat. Even the fish.

Infective Salmon Anaemia has occurred in Ireland and a host of other fish farming nations - it's one of a host of diseases salmon farmers wage eternal chemical warfare against. Instead of destroying the infected fish, as per protocol, they are often promptly killed and sold off. Such diseased fish, if awaiting definitive veterinary diagnosis (which may take some time), may be marketed quite legally. No label warns the consumer that disease dictated the premature slaughter of the fish. While current evidence suggests ISA viruses do not damage humans, who in their right mind would knowingly tuck into fish riddled with pathological organisms?

Some Norwegian operations go one better and ?recycle? whole salmon that die on the farm by grinding the bodies into pellets. Not the kind used to kill slugs either.

To combat numerous diseases, fish are regularly hosed or dipped during their short, miserable lives with powerful pesticides and/or similar compounds may be added to their food. Di-chlorvos, Malachite Green,
Ivermectin, Cypermethrin, Teflubenzuron. Non of these sound good, and rest assured, they aren't. Not for you or the environment. It is a distict possibility that you might be better off inhaling fly-killer.

Agricultural wastes must be treated or spread on land, human sewage must be treated before being released into the sea, yet all fish-farm wastes are free to drift out of the cages and pollute all around them. Ever seen that oily slick around salmon cages. Overfeed a pile of cramped fish with too much oily food and.....well, lets just say if it goes in one end, it's gotta come out the other end.

Now, while a lot of people aren't really worried about escapees from these fish farms and the effect they may have on what's left of our wild salmonids and blissfully unaware that these more disease-resistant (than their wild counterparts) fish are a source of contagion, they will think twice
about what they put in their mouth. Perhaps they will be reassured that to reduce listeria to within EU 'safe' levels, the fish flesh, after slaughter, is dipped in bleach - or 'chlorine-based sanitisers', if you prefer.

Again, the man in the street probably never pauses to wonder where the 5lb of fish need to produce his 1lb of salmon actually comes from. And it may be a good job for his concience that he cannot see the supertrawlers raking it in.

[stevecrow74]

pass me a burger quick :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

[x]

Anyone who eats farmed salmon after reading that a) has a death wish or b) a poor grasp of english or c) has already eaten so much of it that their eysight is going.

Seriously, anyone going to eat farmed salmon ever again?

[stevecrow74]

i used to try convince the person behind the counter of certain supermarkets that they have mistakenly put the wrong tags on the farmed salmon and wild salmon.. often ended up with a wild one for the price of a farmed..

alas no more...

[corbyeire]

really well written sandman - as i said on the other thread i only eat fish that i catch - not saying in some circumstance that they are not riddled with pollution - at least that was random

encouraging pollution like fish farmers in very suceptible areas for a few jobs in the locality and profits in the boardroom makes me sick

will forward it on to as many as possible

[x]

Thanks. Hopefully it'll make a few people not only think about what they are actually eating, but the sort of industry that produces it and the industries that supply it.

will forward it on to as many as possible

Knock yourself out. :lol: I imagine if you printed it off and handed out copies outside any supermarket, they'd either beg, pay or threaten you to leave pronto.

[corbyeire]

depends on whether outside the supermarket is public space or not - more than likely theyd have you on the private property thing and then the paddywaggon would be called - they can make berti jump - think they would beg me for anything

but they know your right - thats the best part :wink:

"Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people." (August 1765) John Adams

[x]

It would amuse me to be banged up for telling the truth and promoting ethical, safe and sustainable food. I doubt that it's a crime for a start. If it is, I'm well in trouble.

Wouldn't look good in the papers for them, that's for sure. Just to be on the safe side, you could chain yourself to something nice and solid. The trolley park, for instance. :lol:

[x]

And on another point, what you catch and eat mightn't be that healthy either.

There's a good article on cancer in fish here:-

http://www.sacn.wales.gower-coast.co.uk ... nders.html

Cefas scientists within the Pathology and Parasitology team are assessing the health of the marine environment under the auspices of the Clean Seas Environmental Monitoring Programme, which undertakes a variety of measurements on sediments, water and fish. As part of the CSEMP, they have observed high numbers of cancers (up to 25%) in flatfish sampled from sites in the North Sea and areas in the Irish Sea, such as in Cardigan Bay.

And in case you wonder, they didn't get the big C from smoking, either.

[corbyeire]

i think i eluded to that above - at least its random - and not mass produced intentional poisoning

im sure everyone on the site would like to have a pint with us two doomsdayers :lol: