1. The Title should be "Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences". It fits the character limit, why change it?
2. A lot of the conditions for Salmon farming can be drastically improved or completely eliminated if they have done it further away in deep sea rather than coast. It just cost more.
3. China is rapidly improving their Salmon Farming so there isn't much to worry about for Norway. In 10 - 20 years time half of it will be gone.
stymaar 55 minutes ago [-]
Points 2 and 3 kind of contradict themselves though, as China doesn't have access to deep sea (at least until the invasion of Taiwan or if China manage to take control of their claimed share of South China Sea).
ksec 22 minutes ago [-]
They are doing both landlocked and mobile deep-sea methods farming with success. In typical Chinese fashion as they have done with Fruit and other food productions, I wouldn't be surprised if they could scale it 10x within 5 years. I doubt it will take away Norway's supply to Japan in the short term due to quality and trust issues. But export to China may be lowered.
reenorap 50 minutes ago [-]
FYI it’s “dramatically improved” not “drastically improved”. Drastically has the connotation of something bad happening so it doesn’t make sense to drastically improve something, it’s like saying “horribly benefited”.
satvikpendem 40 minutes ago [-]
Not really, as people in some dialects do so horribly/terribly improved. Drastic doesn't even mean bad per se, it just means extreme.
freedom_dev 31 minutes ago [-]
"Sushi has been consumed in Japan for more than 1,000 years but the Japanese had historically preferred tuna, seeing raw salmon as parasite-ridden and unpleasant to the palette. "
English isn't my first language and even I know "palette" is wrong. Is it normal for official news outlets to write stuff like this?
dwightgunning 3 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps a happy accident.
whyenot 19 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they are painting the fish and find the experience unenjoyable? :)
gtowey 17 minutes ago [-]
I'm a native English speaker and before your comment, I never noticed that palette, pallet, and palate are different words!
Etheryte 19 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure you've never made a typo or mixed up two similar words before.
dfxm12 7 minutes ago [-]
No. Sometimes the spill checker just auto co-wrecks people.
19 minutes ago [-]
Epa095 2 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to see the power of wealth up close. For one the massive lobbying against any tax on the usage of the fjords(or on the wealth). But there is also cases where they will hire retired professors in tangentially related fields (like sea urchins) to write "scientific reports" "showing" whatever they want, which they then send to individual local MPs to convince them to allow more farming.
syoc 2 hours ago [-]
Strange to have an article about salmon farming drawbacks without mentioning escaped salmons polluting the wild salmon population. There has been a strong decrease in wild salmon as they lose the ability to migrate back up the river to lay their eggs due to breeding with escaped farming salmon.
14 minutes ago [-]
obelos 2 hours ago [-]
That is... unintuitive. Wouldn't the escaped salmon have to be able to get back upstream enough to where the wild salmon are laying/milting?
Hupriene 2 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is that the migration instinct passed down by wild salmon is an epigenetic heritable trait. This trait is strongly selected for in wild salmon populations, but not in farmed populations. The constant influx of this maladaptive trait into the wild population is leading to an overall decrease in the ability of the wild population to successfully propagate.
mmaunder 2 hours ago [-]
They’ve bred more docile salmon, according to the article. Getting that DNA into wild populations would be problematic I’d imagine.
satvikpendem 39 minutes ago [-]
I suppose natural selection will act on those salmon that can't reproduce.
hmottestad 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget the dams and the humpback salmon.
gramie 1 hours ago [-]
Recently there has been a push to farm "dry-land" salmon. In other words, the salmon live in large tanks on land, rather than in pens in the sea.
At the moment a company is trying to start one of these close to me. Some local people are opposed, some are supportive, but most just want more objective study and information (i.e. not performed/paid for by the company itself).
The devil may be in the implementation, but it certainly has some big advantages over the coastal pens.
petterroea 1 hours ago [-]
There have been critical articles about the lice problem in Norwegian newspapers for years, so it's honestly relieving to finally see it talked about abroad. I've felt shameful whenever people talk about the "superior Norwegian salmon".
Hopefully international attention is what it takes for change to meaningfully happen beyond some R&D.
reco98gg 1 hours ago [-]
I am surprised by the statement "Today, salmon sushi is a staple of Japanese cuisine"
While in Japan a few years ago, I found no salmon on the menu in sushi places.
When inquiring why, we were told that salmon is not that good, and that is more a food for kids than adults. Did it change or are we just one data point?
tecleandor 23 minutes ago [-]
I'm trying to recall right now, and maybe the only places where I didn't find salmon in any of my visits was in the more expensive/ fine dinning places (think ¥8000+ places). All the common kaiten sushi places, or chains like SushiZanmai have all kinds of salmon pieces. Different levels of fat, broiled, rolls...
Is it maybe a bit more like "comfort food", for kids, for less delicate palates, cheaper? Maybe. But truth is I haven't asked why I haven't seen it in the expensive places.
magicalhippo 6 days ago [-]
Full title: Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences
Depurator 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of interesting tech is being developed in salmon farming, and e.g. AI has been around for a long time. The north star is offshore farming in giant autonomus constructions far out at sea. Though problem but worth solving
beggi 3 hours ago [-]
Is it though - I feel like the north star is on land farming. So many benefits. Offshore farming will exacerbate farmed salmon escaping and polluting wild salmon + parasites etc (land farmed salmon can generally be eaten raw or under cooked without being frozen without any worries)
pletnes 2 hours ago [-]
There seems to be few offshore production facilities compared to on-land ones.
mmaunder 2 hours ago [-]
Salmon feed lots, with a similar problem of concentrated waste, cruelty and unhealthy animals. Sounds like the underwater egg solution they discuss in the article might also be solving an optics issue they have. Out of sight, out of mind.
Technically it works. Superior Fresh, as in the linked article, has a viable system. The challenge is that in the beginning it is hard to reach a scale that works economically. Added to that, in Norway it is challenging to grow leafy greens in greenhouses in the winter, compared to the latitude where Superior Fresh is located. It can be done, but is energy intensive. We ran a fully indoor pilot facility for five years in Sweden, it is still operational, under a new team. My ambition is to document what we learned in a CC licensed book. At the moment it is partially documented in a blog. https://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-par...
matchbok3 3 hours ago [-]
Some of these farms are truly impressive. Although balancing the health of the fjords is hard. People seem to prefer "wild" salmon but just like we don't eat "wild" cow anymore, I imagine in 30+ years it will be the norm. Hopefully we can shift to that norm in an environmentally friendly way.
throwup238 2 hours ago [-]
We don’t eat wild cows anymore because aurochs went extinct in the last few hundred years.
People still eat junglefowl (ancestor of chickens) and wild boar (pig), but in the developed world domesticated animals are usually both cheaper and tastier.
rf15 2 hours ago [-]
Addendum: People will probably read that as "au-rochs" (and wikipedia's IPA sure isn't helping here), but it's actually split "aur-ochs". (that latter part being the foundation for the current word 'ox')
Source: studied german enough to recognise that word root
epolanski 2 hours ago [-]
Would not feed it to my worst enemy.
8100000000 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
bronlund 2 hours ago [-]
I live in Norway and me and my family do not eat farmed fish - for multiple reasons; political, ecological, animal cruelty etc.
A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon. Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development. And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the feed, farmed salmon would be gray.
I could go on the whole day about this stuff. The whole thing is just sad.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.
Why would you think that? Ground beef typically has higher saturated fat than even farmed salmon and a lot less omega-3.
A hamburger adds a refined carbohydrate bun and sauces on top of that.
I think your political beliefs are overriding factual accuracy.
> And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the food, farmed salmon would be gray.
The color isn’t “fake”. It comes from Asataxanthin. Wild fish get it from food they eat. Farmed fish might get it from microalgae-derived sources. Why would it be “fake” if it’s the same chemical? They’re just feeding the farmed salmon the nutrients they need.
Astaxanthin is also sold separately as a supplement because people seek it out, too. It’s not some evil fake chemical dye. The wild salmon naturally eat it, too.
eth0up 56 minutes ago [-]
Downvote rather than answer the question to a flagrantly stupid claim about burgers and overt shilling for farm-raised poison salmon? That's HN. Make a bullshit claim, full of holes, and when it is irrefutably exposed as bullshit, hide the contrarian comment through downvoting, without refutation. Bravo, you spineless worm, salmon shill bastards.
This is why it is so difficult to take this place seriously. Thankfully it's not the rule, but it does happen far more often that it should.
Anyway, stuff your poison salmon. Feed it to your children all you want. I will take my sourdough, without your mythical fucking hamburger.
11 minutes ago [-]
pibaker 35 minutes ago [-]
> Howdy, My ability to upvote comments was, for reasons unspecified, suspended. After a brief interaction with dang, it was temporarily restored. Then, again for unknown reasons, was suspended once again. So don't expect an upvote from me. I simply can't.
> Bravo, you spineless worm, salmon shill bastards.
And he wonders why.
eth0up 27 minutes ago [-]
Gee, you might want to look in the mirror of your own words: "upvote"
How would suppressing upvotes solve the occasional appropriately hostile comment to other hostile comments? That does not even make sense, just as the mythical demon burger you conjured from the dark depths of cognitive ineptitude, makes no sense.
I also happen to mention, in the trimmed parameters of your selective excerpt, that I rarely downvote. Suppressing the ability to upvote has no plausible such effect as you imply. Allow me to put it, gently, in perspective for you: Indolent Opportunism. Similar to your mythical hamburger creation. It's fine to hate hamburgers, but have some epistemic integrity on the side.
BurningFrog 24 minutes ago [-]
On land we abandoned the hunter/gatherer system for farming thousands of years ago.
Because it just doesn't scale! It can feed 50-100 million people at most.
Maybe we need to empty the oceans of wild fish before we make that transition for seafood, but I hope it can happen a bit more quickly.
panarky 2 hours ago [-]
> A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon.
A sensational statement that is utterly false.
Per 100g, Norwegian farmed salmon has 0.1x the sodium, 0.5x the saturated fat, 2x the protein, 20x the Omega-3 fatty acids and infinity-x the vitamin D of your hamburger.
Farmed salmon is a minimally processed single-ingredient protein, while your hamburger is ultra-processed and packed with refined carbs, added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and chemicals synthesized in a lab.
> Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development.
Presumably you're talking about growth hormones?
Because that American fast-food hamburger has plenty of growth hormones.
Under Norwegian law and European Union/EEA regulations, the use of growth hormones in fish farming is strictly illegal.
learn_more 1 hours ago [-]
cooked salmon and cooked ground beef seem to have similar amounts of protein per my cursory research.
undersuit 11 minutes ago [-]
A hamburger would have a bun at least. We're not comparing filets to patties... which could also contain additions like onion or egg.
eth0up 1 hours ago [-]
Pardon, but how the hell is my hamburger packed with preservatives? And how, other than grinding, is it ultra processed, especially if the beef was given to me by a local rancher? I do not understand? And where the hell did the corn syrup come from? I never put Aunt Jemima on my burgers? Not even brown sugar.
Where in the
- Grass-fed beef
- Sourdough bun
- Lettuce
- Tomato
- Onion
Is all this stuff you cite? Any condiment in the known realm of terrestrial cuisine -- and even adult websites -- can be used on fish just as readily as a burger.
eps 1 hours ago [-]
Perfectly valid point actually, not sure why you are in gray.
eth0up 35 minutes ago [-]
Appreciated, and I apologize not to the target-audience for my other vulgar comment, but to yourself and anyone else who may disagree with me, but at least has the dignity to stand by reason.
One has to wonder why anyone would want to make such a comment invisible, as if they could not see it was already generally suppressed. That is essentially flagging. For a comment that made no false claim or insult. So while I am embarrassed for those who might defend me, I am not deleting my ugly comment. That is the type of comment that might actually deserve flagging, and it was also sincere.
onesandofgrain 2 hours ago [-]
Astaxanthin for the color fair.
What about the salmon is bad for pregnant women?
rsolva 2 hours ago [-]
Fatty fish accumulates heavy metales and other unhealthy components and pregnant women in Norway is told to limit the intake. But it has been controversial, the industry is not happy with these recommendations!
geysersam 18 minutes ago [-]
Can you link to those recommendations? I can't find anything on the Norwegian public health sites specifically about farmed salmon.
Zigurd 56 minutes ago [-]
I can see this being sensible regarding, for example, swordfish, which is long lived apex predator. They get the bio accumulation of everything they eat. Farm salmon has a short life and a controlled diet. Where would they get heavy metals?
pletnes 2 hours ago [-]
From their food and over time, I assume? Since farmed salmon is fed and live a short life I would also assume that it has lower pollution levels than wild fish of similar size and composition.
reenorap 42 minutes ago [-]
You are exactly wrong. Farmed salmon has very high levels of heavy metals and PCB because the water where they are farmed is slow moving accumulate pollution. Wild ocean fish swim in the open ocean where overall pollution is less. That’s why if you buy omega 3 tablets it needs to be from ocean fish otherwise you’re getting a high level of toxic chemicals.
ndr 2 hours ago [-]
I thought this was true for tuna and somewhat never registered it might be true for salmon too. I need to look this up and update, thank you.
anamexis 53 minutes ago [-]
Generally speaking, heavy metals accumulate as you move up the food chain, so it will be true for any large fish.
bronlund 2 hours ago [-]
Growth hormones. It’s better now than some years ago, but still. Some claim the do not use them at all.
And they use a lot of antibiotics.
And there is some accumulation of dioxins and PCBs in the fat due to the feed, but this has also been approved somewhat.
ksec 1 hours ago [-]
>Some claim the do not use them at all.
It is against the law in most if not all EU countries. It is also the dispute between US and EU agriculture trade.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> Astaxanthin for the color fair.
Why is it fair? Wild salmon also consume astaxanthin.
It’s like complaining that the farmers are bad for trying to mimic the fish’s natural diet.
Rendered at 18:56:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
2. A lot of the conditions for Salmon farming can be drastically improved or completely eliminated if they have done it further away in deep sea rather than coast. It just cost more.
3. China is rapidly improving their Salmon Farming so there isn't much to worry about for Norway. In 10 - 20 years time half of it will be gone.
English isn't my first language and even I know "palette" is wrong. Is it normal for official news outlets to write stuff like this?
At the moment a company is trying to start one of these close to me. Some local people are opposed, some are supportive, but most just want more objective study and information (i.e. not performed/paid for by the company itself).
The devil may be in the implementation, but it certainly has some big advantages over the coastal pens.
Hopefully international attention is what it takes for change to meaningfully happen beyond some R&D.
While in Japan a few years ago, I found no salmon on the menu in sushi places.
When inquiring why, we were told that salmon is not that good, and that is more a food for kids than adults. Did it change or are we just one data point?
Is it maybe a bit more like "comfort food", for kids, for less delicate palates, cheaper? Maybe. But truth is I haven't asked why I haven't seen it in the expensive places.
People still eat junglefowl (ancestor of chickens) and wild boar (pig), but in the developed world domesticated animals are usually both cheaper and tastier.
Source: studied german enough to recognise that word root
A hamburger probably has a better nutritional value than farmed salmon. Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development. And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the feed, farmed salmon would be gray.
I could go on the whole day about this stuff. The whole thing is just sad.
Why would you think that? Ground beef typically has higher saturated fat than even farmed salmon and a lot less omega-3.
A hamburger adds a refined carbohydrate bun and sauces on top of that.
I think your political beliefs are overriding factual accuracy.
> And the color is fake, if they do not add coloring to the food, farmed salmon would be gray.
The color isn’t “fake”. It comes from Asataxanthin. Wild fish get it from food they eat. Farmed fish might get it from microalgae-derived sources. Why would it be “fake” if it’s the same chemical? They’re just feeding the farmed salmon the nutrients they need.
Astaxanthin is also sold separately as a supplement because people seek it out, too. It’s not some evil fake chemical dye. The wild salmon naturally eat it, too.
This is why it is so difficult to take this place seriously. Thankfully it's not the rule, but it does happen far more often that it should.
Anyway, stuff your poison salmon. Feed it to your children all you want. I will take my sourdough, without your mythical fucking hamburger.
> Bravo, you spineless worm, salmon shill bastards.
And he wonders why.
How would suppressing upvotes solve the occasional appropriately hostile comment to other hostile comments? That does not even make sense, just as the mythical demon burger you conjured from the dark depths of cognitive ineptitude, makes no sense.
I also happen to mention, in the trimmed parameters of your selective excerpt, that I rarely downvote. Suppressing the ability to upvote has no plausible such effect as you imply. Allow me to put it, gently, in perspective for you: Indolent Opportunism. Similar to your mythical hamburger creation. It's fine to hate hamburgers, but have some epistemic integrity on the side.
Because it just doesn't scale! It can feed 50-100 million people at most.
Maybe we need to empty the oceans of wild fish before we make that transition for seafood, but I hope it can happen a bit more quickly.
A sensational statement that is utterly false.
Per 100g, Norwegian farmed salmon has 0.1x the sodium, 0.5x the saturated fat, 2x the protein, 20x the Omega-3 fatty acids and infinity-x the vitamin D of your hamburger.
Farmed salmon is a minimally processed single-ingredient protein, while your hamburger is ultra-processed and packed with refined carbs, added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and chemicals synthesized in a lab.
> Children and pregnant women should also limit the intake because it can disrupt development.
Presumably you're talking about growth hormones?
Because that American fast-food hamburger has plenty of growth hormones.
Under Norwegian law and European Union/EEA regulations, the use of growth hormones in fish farming is strictly illegal.
Where in the
- Grass-fed beef
- Sourdough bun
- Lettuce
- Tomato
- Onion
Is all this stuff you cite? Any condiment in the known realm of terrestrial cuisine -- and even adult websites -- can be used on fish just as readily as a burger.
One has to wonder why anyone would want to make such a comment invisible, as if they could not see it was already generally suppressed. That is essentially flagging. For a comment that made no false claim or insult. So while I am embarrassed for those who might defend me, I am not deleting my ugly comment. That is the type of comment that might actually deserve flagging, and it was also sincere.
And they use a lot of antibiotics.
And there is some accumulation of dioxins and PCBs in the fat due to the feed, but this has also been approved somewhat.
It is against the law in most if not all EU countries. It is also the dispute between US and EU agriculture trade.
Why is it fair? Wild salmon also consume astaxanthin.
It’s like complaining that the farmers are bad for trying to mimic the fish’s natural diet.