We eat 150m portions of it a year. It is credited with protecting us against heart disease and arthritis. Disruptive children and aggressive prisoners are said to be calmer after eating it.
Alternatively, it is the most contaminated product on the supermarket shelves, harbouring more known carcinogens than any other food stuff. It is responsible for environmental pollution, threatens native species and is endangering the delicate ecosystem of the Highlands.
“I wouldn’t feed it to my cat,” says Bruce Sandison, who has campaigned against it for two decades.
Scottish farmed salmon is our most controversial food. A decade of claim and counterclaim, from the environmental lobby on one side and the salmon producers on the other, has left the consumer more confused and anxious than ever before. If you serve it at a dinner party are you offering guests a healthy, nutritious meal or committing the ultimate culinary faux pas? If you feed it to your children are you stimulating their brains or potentially pumping them full of toxins? With new doubts cast on the benefits of omega-3 essential fatty acids, farmed salmon is once again under the microscope. This is a battle for hearts, minds and stomachs.
Drive up the northwest coast of Scotland and the clear waters are dotted with wire grids; the submerged cages in which the salmon are reared. There are 390 active sites in Scottish waters, according to the environmental protection agency, SEPA. But the visual impact of the cages is only a small part of the environmental consequences of our growing taste for salmon. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, salmon farming in Scotland has grown into a £500m business and now accounts for 40% of all Scottish food exports. Scotland produces in excess of 140,000 tonnes of farmed fish annually. But what price are we paying for that economic success? If Sandison, chairman of the Salmon Farm Protest Group, is to be believed, the answer is one we cannot afford. He believes the damage being done to the environment and to wild salmon and sea trout stocks far outweighs the economic benefits of salmon farming to Scotland.
“Salmon farms have been linked with serious damage to the marine environment,” he says. “Toxic chemicals are used in the production of farmed salmon and can be present in the salmon sold to consumers. Ninety-nine per cent of all salmon sold in supermarkets is farmed and these flabby, diseased fish bear no relation to a wild, leaping salmon.”
Speak to Scottish Quality Salmon, the producers’ organisation, and you could be talking about a different product altogether. “Scottish Quality Salmon is a delicious and highly nutritious food containing the essential omega-3 fatty acids,” says its website. It claims farmed salmon has a role to play in reducing high blood pressure, protecting against heart disease, maintaining a healthy pregnancy and improving kidney function.
In 2002, government scientists looking at toxins in foods found that every sample of farmed salmon in the batch tested positive for at least three toxic chemicals. Two years later, an American study discovered that PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls — banned chemicals originally used in the manufacture of electrical equipment — were “significantly higher” in farmed salmon than in wild salmon, with European-raised salmon more contaminated than fish raised in waters off America.
The stink created was worse than a lorry load of rotting fish. A few months later, Birds Eye, which uses 500 tonnes of salmon annually, cut Scottish farmed salmon from its products and replaced it with wild Pacific salmon. The industry hit back, questioning the integrity of the study, which had been funded by the Pew Trust, an environmental group with a history of campaigning against global pollution. It promoted salmon as a good source of omega-3. But with recent research from the University of East Anglia suggesting that the benefits of omega-3 might may have been overstated, the debate has intensified.
Last week the Food Standards Agency reiterated its advice that we should all be eating “at least two portions of fish per week”. Emma Lane of the FSA says: “The benefits of oily fish outweigh the risks.” The FSA does, however, caution that pregnant women should eat no more than two 140g portions a week because of the potential toxins in fish, which have a cumulative effect in the body and which can be passed on via breast milk. It sounds alarming. What are the dangers of eating three portions a week? “This is over a lifetime,” says Lane. “There is no problem with eating a bit more than usual one week. You’d have to be doing it consistently over a very long period to have any adverse effect.”
Recent research by Norwegian scientists has found that omega-3 can lower levels of aggression in prisoners by up to 35%. According to John Stein, professor of neurophysiology at Oxford University, and brother of celebrity chef Rick Stein, omega-3 oils in fish “can aid reading in dyslexic children, concentration in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder kids, co-ordination in dyspraxia and even the social functioning of autistic children. The bottom line is that fish is good for the brain”.
Concerns about salmon go beyond issues of food safety, however. According to campaigners, there are massive environmental problems. “Aquaculture is the fastest growing sector of the world food economy but has proceeded way in advance of adequate environmental and public health safeguards,” says Don Staniford, an environmentalist, who has advised the European parliament on the issue. “It has become synonymous with pollution and destruction of the marine environment.”
The intensive farming techniques, which can see 50,000 fish in a single cage swimming in the equivalent of a bathful of water each, are a recipe for disease, say campaigners. In addition, the antibiotics used to treat fish infected with sea lice, coupled with the sewage produced by the fish, are discharged directly into the sea.
“We are proud of the way we regulate fish farming,” says Douglas Sinclair, an acquaculture specialist with SEPA. “Any industry of any sort is going to have some form of environmental impact. It’s a consequence of growing food. It’s our job to ensure that impact is kept within reasonable bounds. The salmon producers have to monitor the water and we do monitoring of our own. There is quite a tight handle on their activities.”
Ironically, the one topic on which both sides agree is that organic farmed salmon, the choice of the consumer with a conscience, is not the answer. “Organic food is a personal choice,” says Julie Edgar, communications director of SQS. “But the standards we apply in conventionally farmed salmon are so rigorous that the line between the two is a very thin one.”
“There is no difference in the levels of PCBs in organic salmon or farmed salmon,” says Sandison. “There is no benefit to health from eating the organic salmon — none whatsoever.”
It is not just ordinary consumers who find it impossible to pick their way through the salmon maze. Andrew Fairlie, Scotland’s only double Michelin-starred chef, confesses to being as confused as the rest of us.
“There are strong arguments on both sides,” he says. “I don’t think the product itself is contaminated but the methods they use do cause environmental damage. I don’t use farmed salmon in my restaurants because it bears absolutely no resemblance to the wild fish. And that goes for organic salmon as well.
“I know that environmentally the industry has cleaned up its act in recent years but I just think it is not a natural product any more. We serve wild salmon when we can get it but it’s difficult to source.
“Having said that, I’m sure there are worse things you can eat than farmed salmon . . . It’s a difficult one. We’re in a grey area. Would I feed it to my children? Yes, because it is one of the fish that you can get children to eat.”
For consumers the dilemmas are unlikely to disappear. Total salmon consumption has risen by 48% in the last five years, despite the health scares. According to the market research group TNS Global, salmon is challenging chicken as the nation’s favourite meal. With the first cod and halibut farms appearing off Shetland and Argyll as the industry starts to diversify, the environmental issues are set to intensify. We will be debating the true price of fish for some time to come.
