My diet is circling hard back around to fish, and also to a muted and calm despair about all of the available civilized food supply.

We can eat much, much better, but it is nearly impossible to really eat well or right.

The YouTube experts all agree that farmed fish sucks, though only a few of them thoroughly understand why. Dr Chantel Elston is one of those few:

Marine biologist weighs in on the farmed salmon vs wild salmon debate

On land we at least have the comfort of Organic certification. In the case of seafood, whatever certs and catchphrases exist mean pretty much nothing.

Most certifying bodies I could find are fairly obvious scams run by Industry for its own benefit. Seafood Watch is very big on farmed shit, and the MSC cert is too. (See here for an example of slimy language–“wild-caught” means almost nothing, and now they’re inventing, without standards, stuff like “well, wild-capture at least” . . .).

This all leads to a situation where “DNA tests have shown that up to 43% of salmon in (US) grocery stores and restaurants are mislabeled when salmon are out of season. Of these incorrect labels, almost 70% were on farmed salmon labeled as wild-caught“.

There is no penalty to pay for the lies, of course. The lies turn into profits.

Stepping back for a moment to Dr. Telly’s video, we learn that:

Salmon ‘farms’ are actually crowded prisons, many of them constructed in the ocean itself.

There are frequent jailbreaks.

When they happen, the escaped farm fish start interbreeding with the few actual wild ones left, reducing their genetic fitness as wild things (and incidentally their nutritional value to humans). Moreover, sometimes this process is no accident at all.

The good doctor ends up concluding that we should just leave the poor goddamn fish alone and eat something else, though what exactly that might be remains vague.

Thus living in the Anthropocene Era is a desperately fraught thing. Much the same thing happens by land with GMO frankencrops invading neighboring non-GMO farms, and then to add insult to injury, Monsanto sues the real farmers for ‘patent infringement’ or some other made-up legalistic bullshit.

This is the inevitable logic of the capitalistic mindset, and of glorious Civilization itself.

In the next stage, they will try to convince you that lab-grown ‘salmon’ is a good thing. Seriously.

For myself, I’m going to provisionally trust the people that make the best noises, like Butcherbox where salmon are concerned. (Reminding myself in the process about what I said earlier about Jill Stein.)

And, I’m going to go the other way ’round and teach myself about the relative value, for now, of the sardine burger.