Toxic Food for You and Me

Salmon Lovers - Beware

Don't you just love salmon? Fresh from the Scottish Highlands or from the unspoiled rivers of Canada or Norway? Anyway, I do - and it came as a big surprise that more or less all the salmon we can get today is farmed; in pens. These pens, yes, they are located in Scotland, Canada or Norway - just like the package says or your local supplier swears to. What most of us don't know, however, is that they are mostly raised, fed, sold to, bought and distributed by a few multinational corporations we hardly ever hear about: Marine Harvest, Skretting, Norsk Hydro or AKVA Smart - smart indeed.

And, as it takes about 4 kg of wild fish to grow 1 kg of farmed salmon (and wild fish is scarce these days), these companies have been looking at alternatives for feeding a million salmons each year. Those alternatives, however, make that the salmon you and I get to eat is rather toxic - containing PCBs and other chemicals rather detrimental to our health.

My personal interest in this is not primarily the toxiticy of farmed salmon - though it is a pity - but the immense ruthlessness of how the industry and their hired hands (politicians, scientists, PR consultants) manipulates public opinion - and how they put profit above public health.

To find out more about this, you can switch over to the diligent, insightful and valiant WebPages of SpinWatch, a group monitoring political and corporate SPIN wherever it raises its ugly head.

To go directly to our topic at hand - delicious, pink salmon - here are parts One, Two and Three of this fully documented series.

The Spinning Farmed Salmon report is by David Miller, Professor of Sociology and co-author of