SALMON

Salmon is the most popular fish in the U.S.—Americans collectively consume nearly 450,000 tons each year—and the choices are countless: farmed Atlantic, wild-caught sockeye, king, pink, smoked. Some are green-certified, others are labeled “all-natural.” How to choose? And can you trust that your purchases will deliver on the promise of protecting wild species and safeguarding your health?

That question is at the heart of a growing number of scientific investigations, conservation campaigns, documentary films, and multiple recent class-action lawsuits against the Norwegian seafood company, Mowi USA LLC.

Mowi, which supplies a fifth of the global demand for farmed salmon, is accused of misleading consumers by marketing its Ducktrap River smoked Atlantic salmon as “all natural,” “sustainably sourced,” and “from Maine.” Court documents state that the company acquires its salmon from industrial farms outside the United States where fish in crowded marine pens are often treated with medicines and chemicals, including formaldehyde-based formalin and bleach, to prevent disease and sea lice infestations.

A federal judge in the Southern District of New York has preliminarily approved a proposed $1.3 million settlement that would include requiring the multibillion-dollar company to remove the questionable marketing claims from its packaging. (Meanwhile, Mowi and a handful of other Norwegian salmon companies are under investigation by officials in Europe and the U.S. for allegedly illegally exchanging competitively sensitive information to control the price of farmed salmon.)

Mowi’s communications director, Ola Helge Hjetland, would not comment on the class-action lawsuits, except to say that the company ranks as “the world’s most sustainable animal protein producer,” according to Coller FAIRR Initiative, an investor network that highlights environmental, social, and governance risks and opportunities associated with intensive animal agriculture. She added that Mowi “undergoes third-party audits founded by trusted environmental and food safety organizations.”

Experts say deception at the fish counter is facilitated by seafood’s byzantine route from boat to plate, a fact substantiated by a National Geographic in-depth examination. A salmon, for example, may journey from an Alaskan fishing boat to a processing plant in China to a New York grocery store or restaurant. As it travels, information about the fish, including the species and where and how it was caught or farmed, can get lost or altered.

In 2015, the nonprofit marine conservation organization Oceana tested the DNA of 82 samples of salmon collected from restaurants and grocery stores in numerous U.S. cities. Nearly 70 percent were farmed Atlantic salmon sold as pricier, wild-caught Pacific fish.

“By choosing wild-caught salmon, consumers think they’re making a better choice for the ocean,” says Beth Lowell, deputy vice president of U.S. campaigns at Oceana, which has done more reports on seafood fraud than any other group. “But they’re often getting ripped off.”

Conservation groups and scientists are calling on the U.S. government to require documentation and boat-to-plate trackability for salmon and every other type of seafood.

“Any time a fish is changing hands is an opportunity for a bait and switch,” Lowell says. “Every piece of seafood should have documentation about where it was either caught or farmed, and that piece of fish should be traceable all the way to the consumer’s dinner plate. That way it’s harder to make swaps happen, and easier for the government to track them when they do.” And, she adds, it means that “consumers can have confidence that they’re actually getting what they paid for.”

Pitfalls of farmed salmon

It might seem that eating farmed salmon would be good for the environment—farming reduces pressures on wild populations and protects other wildlife, including threatened and endangered species, from being caught as bycatch in fishing nets. But environmental groups have compared salmon aquaculture facilities to floating pig farms for their high rates of pollution, disease outbreaks, antibiotic use, and infestations of sea lice, marine parasites that feed on the flesh and blood of their fish hosts, causing injury and stress.

Long ago, wild Atlantic salmon—named the “king of fish” for their streamlined, powerful form—reigned rivers in Europe and in North America, from northern Quebec and Newfoundland to Long Island Sound. Each year, tens of thousands instinctively fought the tides to return to the gravel streambeds inland where they were born. But decades of overfishing, damming the rivers, chopping down the forests, and polluting the waters depleted—and in some places eliminated—salmon runs. As a result, commercial fishing of wild Atlantic salmon has been banned in the U.S. since the late 1940s.

With wild Atlantic salmon populations dwindling, fisheries began raising the fish in seawater enclosures close to shorelines. Today, more than two-thirds of the Atlantic salmon consumed in the U.S. is farmed, often imported from as far away as Chile, Scotland, and Norway.

Now, amid mounting pressure to be greener, some Atlantic salmon aquaculture companies are halting the use of antibiotics and introducing so-called feeder fish to control sea lice. The environmental ills of salmon farming in marine pens recently convinced Argentina to become the world’s first country to ban the practice.

“It’s a toxic industry,” says Don Staniford, director of the environmental activism group Scottish Salmon Watch, who regularly sneaks onto Scottish salmon farms, including some owned by Mowi, to record video of dead and dying salmon. He calls Argentina’s decision a “watershed victory.”

In its science-based sustainable seafood recommendations, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch advises against buying most farmed salmon. Exceptions include Atlantic salmon certified by the nonprofit Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), which verifies compliance with the organization’s sustainable aquaculture protocols, and salmon raised on land in giant tanks that prevent the pollution of marine ecosystems and reduce disease by continuously cleaning and recirculating the water.(Here’s how to make sure you’re getting the salmon you’re paying for.)

Spotting imposters

Many environmentally conscious seafood lovers avoid the pitfalls of farmed salmon by buying wild-caught species such as sockeye. A corruption of the indigenous word suk-kegh (red fish), sockeye have a deep reddish-orange hue, and they’re flatter than the plump, blush-colored Atlantic salmon.

Sockeye are also significantly more expensive—often twice the cost—tempting unscrupulous seafood sellers to substitute cheaper farmed filets for a bigger payday. A 2018 investigation by the New York attorney general’s office found that 30 percent of “sockeye salmon” samples from grocery stores across the state were farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

Consumers aren’t the only losers when cheap filets are substituted for wild caught fish.

“One of the things that pisses me off about fraud is sellers are stealing the market share from legit producers,” says seafood fraud expert Robert Hanner, a biologist at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. “When the market is saturated with cheap product, it costs both producers and consumers.”

Hanner dedicates much of his research to finding ways to expose seafood fraud. One of his testing techniques is DNA barcoding, the method used in the New York state investigation. Just as a supermarket scanner matches the barcodes on merchandise to an inventory, DNA barcoding compares a short DNA sequence from a particular gene found in most fish to a database of species barcodes.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for assuring the safety and security of the country’s food supply, collaborated with the Guelph laboratory and the Smithsonian Institution’s Laboratories of Analytical Biology to publish a protocol 10 years ago for seafood DNA barcoding to make it possible to confirm various fish species.

The agency, however, doesn’t use DNA barcoding to spot-check seafood as it travels from boat to plate, a measure Hanner says is essential to prevent widespread fraud.

Meanwhile, he and his Guelph colleagues are testing another technique, called “stable isotope analysis,” that can trace a fish to the exact body of water it came from. “Barcoding has helped uncover huge problems in the seafood supply chain,” Hanner says. “It’s great for telling us who your parents are, but not for where you grew up. For that, we’re using stable isotope analysis.”

Here’s how stable isotope analysis works: Every molecule in a living organism is comprised of different ratios of stable isotopes and fatty acids gleaned from the environment. As fish forage and absorb water from their surroundings, those so-called biotracers leave a “fingerprint” in the fish tissues that can be used to track their geographic origins. The scientists need a reference database of many fish fingerprints from around the world. None exists yet, but the Guelph scientists are remedying that, starting with sockeye salmon from Alaska, British Columbia, and Russia.

Knowing where a piece of sockeye came from is essential for determining how it was fished, and at what cost to the environment. Alaska is widely considered to have a sustainable sockeye fishery. British Columbia’s salmon industry recently withdrew from the Marine Stewardship Council’s eco-certification program for its wild chum, pink, and sockeye in 2019 because it couldn’t meet sustainability conditions and didn’t want to risk failing an audit. Many sockeye fisheries in eastern Russia are threatened by habitat loss, industrial pollution, and large-scale poaching, believed to be driven by organized crime in East Asian markets.

Hanner and Guelph biologist Kevin McCann invited me and Dane Chauvel, co-founder and CEO of Organic Ocean Seafood Inc., a sustainable seafood supplier in British Columbia, to carry out a first test of stable isotope data for sockeye salmon against random samples in the marketplace. The scientists would also do DNA barcoding to check the species’ identifications.