the film forum library tutorial contact

Try the Wild Salmon by Rod Hearne Editorial, Seattle Times - August 1, 2003

I find it appalling that The Times pooh-poohed reports that the farmed salmon industry may be selling a product laden with cancer-causing PCBs ("Farm fresh salmon," editorial, July 31). Your argument that wild salmon is too expensive for the "human family" has a Marie-Antoinette quality about it: "Let them eat toxic fish."

Additionally, farmed Atlantic salmon is much less rich in the healthy omega-3 fatty acids than its wild Pacific cousins. The possibility that whatever fatty acids Atlantic salmon retain may be contaminated with PCBs is alarming indeed.

Farmed salmon is fed food from questionable sources. Farming salmon pollutes the regions around the farms. Escaped, alien, Atlantic salmon contaminate and compete with native, Pacific species. And if that weren't enough, Atlantic salmon tastes bad! A generation of Americans have been raised thinking that they don't like salmon, when all they've ever tried is the farmed stuff.

Atlantic salmon gives real, wild salmon a bad name. Why defend such a shoddy product? Have you no pride in the Pacific Northwest's unique wild salmon fishery? Have you no taste?