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Wild about salmon?
At first glance
Take two salmon, one wild and one farmed: one has the lean and glossy look of a sportsman, the other looks like a fat, pasty businessman. Grasp each fish just below the tail and pick it up – the farmed salmon will slither through your hand, the wild one will stay put, its tail taut from plenty of exercise. The tail belonging to the farmed salmon has been worn away by contact with hundreds of other fish constantly rubbing against it. Look closer and you will notice black blunted scarring on the farmed salmon’s fins. This is the main visual difference between farmed and wild salmon.
Taste test
Intensively farmed salmon can be tasteless, wet and flabby in texture. The colour of the flesh is very different, too – wild salmon is a vibrant orange, some farmed salmon is a peculiar fluorescent pink. Once you’ve tasted the best wild stuff, the difference becomes so clear it’s very difficult to eat the farmed stuff again with any pleasure. However, the farmed salmon lobby would still accuse you of snobbery – and only an estimated 2% of salmon eaten in the UK is wild, a proportion dwindling year by year.
From staple to luxury – and
back again
In the 19th century, wild salmon were so plentiful in the lochs and burns that Scottish estate workers protested against having to eat it more than three times a week. In Newcastle, there was even a bye-law against it. The methods used to catch salmon, either by trapping or line-fishing did not significantly dent the population. But growing demand and increasingly polluted rivers soon led to diminishing supply.
Since the 1960s, salmon farming has been very big business, supported as it is by huge European grants aimed at reviving depressed rural areas. It seemed such a good and simple idea – conserve dwindling wild stocks by providing an alternative. But as salmon was farmed in ever-increasing numbers it started to lose its luxury status and was soon perceived as an everyday food with the added health benefits of long-chain fatty acids. But lowering the price of food by cutting corners always causes problems – and farming salmon turns out to be an environmental disaster.
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