Kenny Torella

So another way to put this is essentially nine out of every 10 animals raised for meat are fish.

Fish farming is the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world.

This is what at Vox we like to call a hidden in plain sight story, which is why I wanted to write about it.

The development of fish farming over the last 50 years represents one of the biggest transformations in food production that has received really little attention, but has had huge consequences for food security, for nutrition, for animal welfare, and for the environment.

And the fish that you picked to focus on in your piece for Vox was the humble or beautiful salmon.

Why did you pick salmon?

Well, I picked salmon because they have become America's favorite fish to eat.

After shrimp, we eat salmon more than any other aquatic animal.

But salmon farming has also kind of become emblematic of some of the problems with fish farming more broadly.

It emerged in the 1970s largely in response to man-made problems over the previous century, overfishing, industrial pollution, climate change, dams.

These had all come together to really decimate wild Atlantic salmon populations to the point where they were actually added to the endangered species list in the early 2000s, which made it illegal to fish them.

We're emptying the oceans at an alarming rate.

Worldwide, 80% of commercial fish stocks have been declared fully exploited or overexploited.

So with the goal of taking pressure off of depleted wild populations, seafood producers really began to scale up salmon farming in the 1970s, and it has boomed ever since.

It's become a massive industry.

It's concentrated in Norway, Chile, and the United Kingdom, where they produce almost 3 million metric tons of fish each year, which comes out to be about 560 million salmon.

And about one out of every five

farmed salmon are shipped off to the U.S.

to stock our grocery store shelves and restaurants.

Okay, so what does this all look like?