Chapter 1: What is the significance of fish farming in today's food industry?
At McDonald's, there's always something to have. I like the fish. I like it.
In the barrage of executive orders that President Trump signed this year, one back in April flew low under the radar. The order aimed, among other things, to allow the expansion of aquaculture or fish farming by relaxing regulations.
It's crazy. The regulation.
And the president has a point here.
Chapter 2: How has fish farming evolved over the decades?
In 2022, for the first time, humans ate more fish that came from farms than fish that came from the sea. Many of us think that this is much better, more ethical, more environmentally sound than overfishing wild fish from the oceans. So why not expand it? Coming up on Today Explained, Vox's Kenny Torella takes a deep dive, LOL, into what's really been going on on fish farms.
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Chapter 3: What are the environmental impacts of fish farming?
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I'm Noelle King with Vox's Kenny Torella. Kenny writes about animal welfare and the future of meat production. And lately, Kenny has been considering fish farming.
Chapter 4: Why is salmon farming considered emblematic of fish farming issues?
Kenny, how long has this been going on? Well, throughout history, there are examples of small-scale fish farming, but it only took off on a commercial scale in the 1990s. And it took off really quickly. By the early 2000s, humans were farming well over 200 aquatic animal species, and most of this has been concentrated in China and India.
But I think what is so noteworthy here is that chickens, pigs, and cows, you know, they were domesticated over thousands of years, while fish have been domesticated, which is essentially kind of forcing them into unnatural conditions, in a matter of decades.
As some marine biologists have written, aquatic domestication occurred 100 times faster than the domestication of land animals and on such a bigger scale. How big, Kenny, is the fish farming industry? Well, for context, today there's around 85 billion land animals, mostly chickens, pigs, and cows, farmed each year. 85 billion.
But there's an estimated 760 billion fish and crustaceans, which is a figure that is projected to quickly grow. 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.
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Chapter 5: How does fish farming affect wild salmon populations?
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.
The UN estimates a third of all seafood might be overfished.
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? What's going on at your typical fish farm?
Yeah, so I'll talk about salmon farms specifically, although they're all pretty similar. They're raised by the hundreds of thousands or even millions in floating cages in the ocean just offshore.
And so it's borrowing all the bad practices that are happening on land Heavy use of pesticides, antibiotics. This was industrial pig farming out in the ocean. Hundreds of salmon farms use what are known as open net cages. They release harmful waste into the sea, including salmon lice.
And it's worth noting that this type of salmon farming and just fish farming in general has a relatively small carbon footprint compared to other meats, which has been a big selling point in its global ascendance over the last few decades.
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Chapter 6: What are the ethical concerns surrounding fish farming practices?
But salmon farming has also become a flashpoint among environmentalists in Norway, Canada, in the UK, even in the US. Washington state banned salmon farming earlier this year. Because when you cram so many animals into the ocean and all of their waste, it leads to a lot of pollution.
You know, salmon farmers are often trying to treat or prevent various diseases, which means that they're dumping a lot of chemicals into the water that can hurt other marine life. And this has actually even pitted salmon farmers against the wild catch fishermen who say that the salmon farms are polluting and killing off the wild fish populations that they depend on for their livelihoods.
I think there's one other reason why the fight over salmon farms have become so symbolic in the environmental movement. And it's because in the wild, there are these carnivorous hunters who migrate thousands of miles from freshwater rivers out into the salty Atlantic Ocean. But on salmon farms, they're reduced to swimming in tiny circles for years and eating small man-made pellets.
And so I think for a lot of environmentalists and naturalists, it's seen almost as a crime against nature. You know, one researcher I talked to compared it to trying to farm tigers, which was a Pretty illuminating analogy to me. Yeah, it is. In the second half of the show, we're going to get into some detail about what exposés have found on fish farms.
It is not for the weak of heart, but if you are a salmon farmer, how do you make the argument for what you do? Well, the first part has to do with how, like I mentioned earlier, salmon and fish in general tend to have a low carbon footprint compared to, say, beef or pork. Right.
But the other counterargument is essentially that if people want to eat a lot of salmon, and they do, and there aren't a lot left in the wild, we have no choice but to farm them. Has farming salmon actually helped the numbers of wild salmon rebound? I mean, if overfishing was the initial problem and the solution is, OK, we're going to farm salmon and let the guys out in the wild do their thing.
Was the solution really a solution?
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Chapter 7: How do fish experience pain and consciousness?
Likely not. Big picture research has suggested that there's little to no evidence that farming fish has helped wild populations rebound. And that's largely because a lot of the fish that are caught in the ocean are fed back to farmed fish.
According to Stanford's Center for Environmental Science and Policy, one pound of salmon takes about 2.4 pounds of other wild fish to produce, usually sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, and so on. Some of this fish meal does come from fish byproduct and scraps from other fish that have been processed to be eaten.
But most of it comes from wild caught fish that are being caught just to feed the salmon. So the effects of salmon on the environment ripple out far beyond the farms themselves to the soy farms and fisheries that feed them.
But looking specifically just at salmon, farming them is actually hurting wild populations in a way that really surprised me as I worked on this story. So since the 1970s, tens of millions of farmed salmon have managed to escape their cages and make their way into the ocean.
thousands of Atlantic salmon that escape from a fish farm to the east of Victoria into the open waters of Puget Sound, the Pacific Ocean. You're introducing a non-native invasive species into an environment where you don't know what the potential outcome might be.
They will spawn and they have produced and have done in the past in multiple events and the progeny they produce are competitively viable, meaning that they can compete successfully and in some cases superior to our native salmon.
And when they escape, they either compete for resources with wild salmon or they mate with them, leading to what experts call genetic pollution that has resulted in a whole new hybrid line of salmon, which have a harder time surviving in the wild.
And what that means is that the farming of salmon, which was intended to give wild salmon populations a break, actually created this new challenge for them. All right. So the initial problem that was meant to be solved by salmon farming has not actually been solved.
And then, Kenny, as you're reporting later discovered, scientists have been making some really, really interesting discoveries about what fish actually feel. You want to stick around? We'll talk about that next.
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Chapter 8: What alternatives to fish farming could be more sustainable?
Let's do it.
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That makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Support for this show comes from Odoo.
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.
That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.
Today Explained is back with Vox's Kenny Torella, who's been looking at aquaculture, which is a fancy way of saying fish farming. Kenny, so we talked in the first half about the process. This is not something that I had ever given a ton of thought to, but increasingly I feel very bad about that. Is it just me? It's not just you. Okay.
Our colleague Marina Blatnikova recently wrote a story about the scientific debate over fish pain, and she talked about how a lot of us probably never think about fish because they're hard to empathize with, unlike, say, a cow. No big eyes. Exactly. And while fish make sounds to communicate with one another, we can't hear them. So in many ways, they're kind of alien to us.
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