Buying the farmed (salmon, that is)

I was at the grocery store last week buying wild Alaskan salmon (previously frozen) at an affordable $9.99 a pound, as another customer was asking the "fishmonger" for a cut of the wild salmon. When this customer spied the farmed Atlantic salmon for a mere $4.99 a pound, he immediately changed his order to the farmed, I suspect based on the cost.

I had to stop myself from saying anything, lest I came off sounding like a crazy lecturing enviro-nutball. Which, of course, I sometimes am.

1. The wild salmon fishery in Alaska is actually one of the few sustainable fisheries left in the world
2. Wild salmon has more heart-healthy Omega 3s
3. Wild salmon has considerably less PCBs as compared to farmed
4. Farmed salmon is oftentime dyed to give it the pink color
5. Farmed salmon spread parasites and disease to wild salmon and compete for habitat when they escape their pens

The list goes on and on. (If you want to get really depressed about the state of our fisheries, read Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas.)

Anyway, what would you do? Or what do you do? Would you have launched into the many reasons why choosing wild, in spite of the cost, is better than farmed? Or would you hold your tongue? Or do you buy the farmed?

Omnivore's Delusion: Debunked

It's been a while since I've had so much to say and I've got a crapton of posts lined up. I hate to throw this post under the Saturday bus (when readership is low), but I thought it was an important article for y'all to check out.

Tom Philpott has a response in Grist to the article, The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals written by a corn/soy farmer from Missouri published in The American, a right-wing journal.

Tom starts off by acknowledging the obvious issues inherent with sustainable agriculture such as these three big challenges:

1) soil fertility—in the absence of synthesized nitrogen and mined phosphorous and potassium, how are we to build soil fertility on a larger scale?;
2) labor—sustainable farming requires more hands on the ground; who’s going to work our farm fields, and at what wages?; and
3) access—in an economy built on long-term wage stagnation, how can we make sustainably grown food accessible to everyone?

He then goes on to discuss the flaws in the Omnivore's Delusion article. I'll leave you to read what Tom Philpott has to say since he's going to do a better job than I. So go check it out! And come back here and let me know what you think.