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- Hacker News
- I live in Norway and me and my family do not eat farmed fish - for multiple reasons; political, ecological, animal cruelty etc.
A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon. Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development. And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the feed, farmed salmon would be gray.
I could go on the whole day about this stuff. The whole thing is just sad.
by bronlund - Astaxanthin for the color fair. What about the salmon is bad for pregnant women?
- > A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.
A sensational statement that is utterly false.
Per 100g, Norwegian farmed salmon has 0.1x the sodium, 0.5x the saturated fat, 2x the protein, 20x the Omega-3 fatty acids and infinity-x the vitamin D of your hamburger.
Farmed salmon is a minimally processed single-ingredient protein, while your hamburger is ultra-processed and packed with refined carbs, added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and chemicals synthesized in a lab.
> Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development.
Presumably you're talking about growth hormones?
Because that American fast-food hamburger has plenty of growth hormones.
Under Norwegian law and European Union/EEA regulations, the use of growth hormones in fish farming is strictly illegal.
by panarky - The myth of the good savage strikes again. Animal cruelty is a such elastic term that I'm wondering why they don't use it still to make condoms.
Predators trying to eat you alive all the time, cannibalism, diseases making tunnels in your muscle, famine, acid water, contamination, environmental changes, noise levels that could make you crazy. If you have luck you reproduce once and then die of exhaustion and skin infections. If not, a bear eats you alive just when you were thinking in losing your virginity at 40 Yo, finally. Or a fishermen puts a hook in your eye, or in the mouth just for fun, pulls you out of the water and lets you suffocate slowly. Or you bang your head against a concrete wall. This is the normal journey of a wild salmon.
And this is NOT animal cruelty. This does not make you sad.
If you are on a crusade to remove animal cruelty, look at all this people living in Tokyo. They are packed like sardines in a can. But humans are gregarious animals, so it does not matter!. (They are happy!). Salmons on the other way are gregarious animals, so it is a big problem!. (They are sad!. They talk to me complaining!)
Is a problem, simply because it does not fit into our ideological vision of the world. An infantile paradise where salmons are nice little people with tiny hats that party with Pepa pig. They love bananas, football and to climb trees. (They must love it, because we do).
The idea that salmons are predatory fishes and would not mind to eat their siblings if they can catch them... don't like that. Protect me from the real world, pikachu.
by pvaldes - > Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development
Do farm raised fish still have elevated heavy metal levels? I figured that getting human controlled food would cut down on that.
by klooney - On land we abandoned the hunter/gatherer system for farming thousands of years ago.
Because it just doesn't scale! It can feed 50-100 million people at most.
Maybe we need to empty the oceans of wild fish before we make that transition for seafood, but I hope it can happen a bit more quickly.
by BurningFrog - I remember meeting a Russian immigrant who thought Norwegian sour cream was synthetic because it wasn't watery as the one she had at home.by varjag
- > A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.
Why would you think that? Ground beef typically has higher saturated fat than even farmed salmon and a lot less omega-3.
A hamburger adds a refined carbohydrate bun and sauces on top of that.
I think your political beliefs are overriding factual accuracy.
> And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the food, farmed salmon would be gray.
The color isn’t “fake”. It comes from Asataxanthin. Wild fish get it from food they eat. Farmed fish might get it from microalgae-derived sources. Why would it be “fake” if it’s the same chemical? They’re just feeding the farmed salmon the nutrients they need.
Astaxanthin is also sold separately as a supplement because people seek it out, too. It’s not some evil fake chemical dye. The wild salmon naturally eat it, too.
by Aurornis - Full title: Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequencesby magicalhippo
- A lot of interesting tech is being developed in salmon farming, and e.g. AI has been around for a long time. The north star is offshore farming in giant autonomus constructions far out at sea. Though problem but worth solvingby Depurator
- Is it though - I feel like the north star is on land farming. So many benefits. Offshore farming will exacerbate farmed salmon escaping and polluting wild salmon + parasites etc (land farmed salmon can generally be eaten raw or under cooked without being frozen without any worries)by beggi
- I think this is a veiled advertisement for Norway. Half of the world is engulfed in wars and terror (half across the road towards Mad Max), however Norway is worrying about the environmental effect of salmon feces on its fjords.
- Eh foreign correspondent stuff like this tends to release at the end of a long pipeline. They spent 12 months on a piece on Israel that was focusing on the conditions of Palestinians near Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and it dropped a couple weeks after October 7, you could tell that they were pissed that it wasn't about Gaza, but were still happy to be in roughly the correct ballpark.
There other arm, 4Corners, did a piece about a big government construction project and IIRC there was a different prime minister when it released vs when they started the investigation.
by protocolture - Maybe this is the future https://www.science.org/content/article/oceans-away-raising-...
- Technically it works. Superior Fresh, as in the linked article, has a viable system. The challenge is that in the beginning it is hard to reach a scale that works economically. Added to that, in Norway it is challenging to grow leafy greens in greenhouses in the winter, compared to the latitude where Superior Fresh is located. It can be done, but is energy intensive. We ran a fully indoor pilot facility for five years in Sweden, it is still operational, under a new team. My ambition is to document what we learned in a CC licensed book. At the moment it is partially documented in a blog. https://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-par...
- Recently there has been a push to farm "dry-land" salmon. In other words, the salmon live in large tanks on land, rather than in pens in the sea.
At the moment a company is trying to start one of these close to me. Some local people are opposed, some are supportive, but most just want more objective study and information (i.e. not performed/paid for by the company itself).
The devil may be in the implementation, but it certainly has some big advantages over the coastal pens.
by gramie - Nagano, Japan does land farming of salmon. It's a landlocked state far from any coast so the farming is done in inland rivers and lakes. It's a crossbreed of rainbow trout and brown trout that produces a sterile hybrid called Shinshu Salmon so I don't know if it's actually real salmon, but it tastes like the same thing.
https://www.pref.nagano.lg.jp/suisan/jisseki/salmon/english....
by SenHeng - I'm no expert but that seems like it could be very energy intensive. All the systems to maintain water quality, temperature. Not to mention the problems that arise having fish in such high density.
There are other places in the world that farm salmon at a much lower density which helps in terms of disease and bioload on the environment. There's a company in New Zealand attempting to build open ocean fish pens, they might already have a prototype out already can't remember. Different species of salmon though.
- funny, I tried to tell people and share with them about this salmon farming problem since many years, including quality, pollution, diseases and industrial feeding.
It is important to be aware of this and dont abuse salmon eating since imho some kind of risk is there, beside the negativity of its farming!
There are many documentaries online that show the core farming problem, it is interesting to see based on the article that this problems are becoming bigger and bigger and beside the lobbying hopefully there will be investments to solve it.
I'm surprised that a country like Norway and Norwegian people allow such abuse of the fjords and of the animal... but yeah I guess always same story, work for people, business, lobbying etc. if its oil, fish pig or cow the game is the same.
awareness is the first step, change is what is needed!
by giov4 - I am surprised by the statement "Today, salmon sushi is a staple of Japanese cuisine"
While in Japan a few years ago, I found no salmon on the menu in sushi places.
When inquiring why, we were told that salmon is not that good, and that is more a food for kids than adults. Did it change or are we just one data point?
by reco98gg - It's a staple of Yelp restaurants. Yelp considers "fish" and "salmon" to be synonyms. Try to search Yelp for a place that serves trout.by Animats
- I've been here for 15+ years and I've never seen a sushi place without salmon. But I've never been to a "fancy" sushi place, just supermarkets, kaiten chains and neighborhood restaurants that are $20-40 a head.
Salmon is not a "traditional" sushi ingredient because, until the introduction of flash-freezing, it couldn't be eaten raw due to the risk of parasites. That changed in the 80s or so, I think.
- I've been last year and none of the 4+ Tabelog-rated sushi places I've been to had it. It was quite common in grocery stores though; sashimi grade was cheap and plentiful.by bogdan
- I remember asking a Japanese chef in Japan, in 2019, and the answer I got was that sushi is much less popular in Japan than believed outside of Japan, and a lot more people eat rice and chicken, pork, etc., than salmon.by oblio
- Salmon sushi is very popular, but it's not part of the traditional Edomae style (fish from the Tokyo bay), so the more upscale or traditional restaurants often don't serve it.by ramchip
- I'm trying to recall right now, and maybe the only places where I didn't find salmon in any of my visits was in the more expensive/ fine dinning places (think ¥8000+ places). All the common kaiten sushi places, or chains like SushiZanmai have all kinds of salmon pieces. Different levels of fat, broiled, rolls...
Is it maybe a bit more like "comfort food", for kids, for less delicate palates, cheaper? Maybe. But truth is I haven't asked why I haven't seen it in the expensive places.
by tecleandor - It's hard to say, depending on how far back your idea of "a few years ago" might be or where exactly you ate. After all, Japan has a lot of sushi restaurants and even different sushi styles. For example, you definitely wouldn't find salmon in an edomae sushi restaurant.
For reference, salmon was the most popular choice in conveyor belt sushi places 3 years ago. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01627/
by dfxm12 - There have been critical articles about the lice problem in Norwegian newspapers for years, so it's honestly relieving to finally see it talked about abroad. I've felt shameful whenever people talk about the "superior Norwegian salmon".
Hopefully international attention is what it takes for change to meaningfully happen beyond some R&D.
by petterroea - This other problem is partially solved.by pvaldes
- Solvable by using lasers!
Not "sharks with lasers" but "Stingray Laser system"
https://www.kvaroyarctic.com/the-stingray-laser-system-the-s...
by teytra