"Farmed and dangerous"

In front of a Whole Foods grocery store in San Francisco, environmentalists and fishermen agree: Salmon raised on fish farms are pallid, polluting affronts to nature!

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Nov 7, 2003 | With so much to protest these days, who will speak for the fish?

At 11 a.m. on a drizzly, overcast Wednesday morning, Jonah Blumstein, 27, and a choir of a half-dozen developmentally disabled adults whom he teaches at Clausen House in Oakland, Calif., sang for the salmon.

In front of Whole Foods Market in San Francisco, at the corner of California and Franklin streets in Pacific Heights, Blumstein strummed along on the guitar, serenading the passing rivers of traffic, migrating FedEx trucks and BMWs. He started out with a solo number called "Real Color," a folk protest song he'd written just last week for this occasion:

"Don't try to fool us with your pink-colored dye.
Don't try to sell us, what you won't buy.
Don't try to fool us with your genes modified.
True color comes from the inside."

A gigantic 12-foot-long salmon, made out of silver insulation, bobbed along to the tune, under the semi-control of the stilt-walker wearing it. A posse of about 15 other protesters lined the sidewalk, waving green and aqua banners suggesting "Think twice about eating farmed salmon" and, more directly -- "Farmed salmon: Don't you think it's kind of gross?"

The true color of wild salmon in the ocean -- ranging from pink to red -- comes from the fish's carnivorous diet of krill and shrimp. But since salmon farmers keep costs down by feeding their stock cheaper fish meal, producing salmon with grayish flesh, some grocery stores have been known to sell dyed fish to fit consumer expectations of what salmon should look like.

The iniquitousness of dying farmed salmon to make it look more palatable on the plate is just one of the charges being leveled at the aquaculture industry by the protesters, who pass out leaflets to shoppers and drivers with this headline: "Farmed salmon are fed antibiotics, colorants and pesticides. Bon appetit."

But the fishmongers at Whole Foods, the kind of grocery store where the toilet paper is 100-percent recycled and soy protein powder is sold by the coffee can, aren't taking these rhetorical barbs lying down. They had their own leaflet handy to pass out to any customers who now aren't sure what to make of the pink salmon glistening seductively behind the fish counter: $14.99 a pound for the wild king salmon fillet, $8.99 a pound for the farmed "Black Pearl/Natural Choice" salmon.

The flier brags about the store's wild-caught salmon, "certified by the Marine Stewardship Council," but adds that "to meet the ever-increasing demand for it, in addition to wild varieties, we also carry farm-raised salmon from producers who are committed to making advances in technology and minimizing environmental impact." Then, it assures shoppers that the farmed salmon sold here is chemical-, antibiotic- and dye-free.

"Nobody wants to overfish the oceans so our kids have no fish to eat," says John Dugery, the grocery store's seafood team leader, who argues that Whole Foods is part of the solution to finding "sustainable" sources of fish, by offering farmed fish from the more environmentally sensitive fish farms. He shows off a slab of farmed salmon: "That stuff is, like, cutting edge." As for the protesters: "They target us because they know our customers are environmentally conscious."

Might the lady in the giant-salmon costume and the folksinger with his tale of pink-dye woe be better off making the case against farmed salmon in front of some big-box retailer where lower-grade, antibiotic-stoked, dyed salmon, dumped on the market from Chile, is sold for cut-rate prices?

Kate Dugas, consumer campaign coordinator for Living Oceans Society, one of the 10 organizations making up the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, which organized the protest outside, disagrees. She says that her organization has been trying to work with Whole Foods for a year, with no luck, urging them to pressure their suppliers to stop using open-net pens for salmon farming.

Next Page: Who wants to eat fish raised in a stew of their own poop?

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