5 Things to Consider Before You Eat Fish from a Farm

Fish farming also known as aquaculture has been practiced for centuries. Aquaculture includes an extensive variety of both freshwater and saltwater finfish, crustaceans, and mollusks. Farmed species include salmon, shrimp, catfish, carp, Arctic char, trout, tilapia, eels, tuna, crabs, crayfish, mussels, oysters, and some aquatic plants like seaweed. 

If you eat seafood, and you don’t collect it yourself or ask the right questions while buying it, chances are that it comes from a fish farm. Farming of seafood has almost the same difficulties that factory farming has. Just like chicken, beef, pork, and eggs from factory farms have devastating impressions on the soil, water, and air, industrial fish farms flush their problems into the shared resource i.e. the ocean.

People now prefer fish over chicken as it has far more health benefits as compared to chicken. Many diet conscious people even completely rely on fish over chicken to complement their diet plans which include protein-based meat and protein shakes etc. So, if you’re one of the fish lovers can find salmon recipes at Huon Aqua & keep these things in mind:

1.  Farmed fish have dubious nutritional value: The unsatisfying absurdity for people who eat fish to improve their health is that the nutritional benefits of fish can be greatly reduced when it’s farmed. Take omega-3 fatty acids. Wild fish get their omega-3 from aquatic plants. Farmed fish, however, are often fed corn, soy, or other feedstuffs that contain very less or no omega-3 at all.  Due to this, some farmed fish accumulate unhealthy levels of the wrong fatty acids. Moreover, farmed fish are regularly subjected to antibiotics, and consuming these fish can cause antibiotic-resistant disease in humans. 

2.  Farmed fish are loaded with disease, and this spreads to wild fish populations: Farmed fish are often packed tightly in their net. They are usually crumpled into a bathtub-sized space. These peculiar conditions allow bacteria and parasites to attack and make way, they can even migrate to the farm and infect wild fish populations. 

3.  Compromised gene pool: Due to the damaging and unpleasant living conditions, most farmed fish end up escaping and mixing with the wild fish. These absconded fish breed with wild fish and compromise the gene pool, harming the wild population. For example, adult hybrid salmon routinely die earlier than their purebred relatives. This in return, hurts predators who rely on fish like bears and orcas. 

4.  Damaging living conditions: Like all other living organisms, fish excrete waste as well; they poop. Farmed fish waste falls as residue to the seabed in large quantities and destroy marine life. It also becomes the reason for the growth of marine algae that reduces the oxygen content in water and makes living conditions worse for the other organisms living in the same habitat. 

5.  Fish farms are rife with toxins, which also damage local ecosystems: Of course, you cannot allow diseases and parasites to infect your economic units, to fight back, the operators dump concentrated antibiotics and other chemicals into the water. Such toxins not only damage local ecosystems but also kills a variety of marine organisms.