Why I Finally Love Farmed Fish

Former skeptic Josh Ozersky sees benefits to the earth
By Emily Rauhala,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 5, 2010 8:37 AM CDT
Why I Finally Love Farmed Fish
Greg Lambert, freshwater production manager for Cooke Aquaculture, poses with a 24-pound female Atlantic salmon at a hatchery in Bingham, Maine, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008.   (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

Not even a fish-loving foodie can justify the environmental cost of wild-caught salmon. "If I could, I would only eat wild," writes Josh Ozersky for Time. "But I can't in good conscience." Sure, farmed salmon's "taste is duller, the flesh flabbier, the finish forgettable." But "with wild populations getting wiped out by overfishing" and 90% of ocean life forms predicted to collapse by 2048, there is no other choice.

Yes, there are real concerns about aquaculture and genetically modified fish. Let's do better, Ozersky urges. But there is nothing wrong with making food easier to grow, especially with the the danger of "a food-scarcity crisis larger than any the world has ever known" looming. "Eating the so-called 'Frankenfish,' however scary it may sound, is a small price to pay for saving the world. And who knows? Some day it might even taste as good as its wild cousins."
(More genetically altered food stories.)

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