Everywhere Else

There is a fillet of farmed salmon in the chiller of every supermarket in the country, and it is cheap, and it is dressed in the language of virtue. Responsibly farmed. Sustainably sourced. Ocean-reared. The words are chosen with great care, by people paid well to choose them, and they are designed to let you put the packet in your trolley and feel, if anything, faintly good about it. I do not blame anyone for buying it. I have bought it. The point of the words is that you should not have to think, and mostly, standing in a shop with the day to get through, you don’t.

Here is the thing worth thinking about, though, and it fits on the back of the same packet. The animal in that plastic was raised in a net cage in the open sea, and a great many of the countries that know most about salmon have looked hard at that arrangement and decided they will not have it.

Washington State banned it outright. This came after one of the cages there, run by a large operator, collapsed and spilled better than two hundred thousand farmed Atlantic salmon into Pacific water where they did not belong, and the state looked at the wreckage and at the science and concluded that net-pen farming was not worth the risk to its wild fish. Denmark will not permit new open finfish farms in its seas. Argentina did something even more striking: it banned salmon farming before the industry could get established at all, writing the prohibition into national law to protect the cold clean waters of Tierra del Fuego from an industry it had watched chew up the coastline of neighbouring Chile. A country turning down the money in advance. That is not nothing.

Even Norway, and this is the part that undoes the usual excuse, even Norway, which farms more salmon than anyone on earth and has built a national fortune on it, does not pretend the cages are harmless. It runs what it calls a traffic-light system: the coast is divided into zones, the sea lice on the wild fish in each zone are counted, and when the count climbs too high the zone goes red and the farms there are made to shrink their production. Green, you may grow. Red, you must cut back. It is a blunt instrument, and the campaigners there argue it is too lenient, and they are probably right. But observe what it concedes as a matter of settled national fact: that the lice from the farms harm the wild fish, and that a government’s job is to hold the one in check to protect the other. British Columbia, meanwhile, has told its farmers to get out of the open water altogether and into closed containment by the end of the decade.

The common thread is not that these places hate aquaculture. Most of them eat and export a great deal of farmed fish. The thread is that they have accepted a piece of evidence and organised their law around it: that an open cage in the sea is a cage with the sea running through it, and everything the fish inside carry, the lice, the disease, the waste, the escapees, runs out through the same water the wild fish must use. You cannot fence the sea. What you farm in it, you farm in the commons.

And then there is here. Ireland, which has the Atlantic salmon woven so deep into its self-image that the fish is on the old coins and in the oldest stories, the Salmon of Knowledge itself, licenses new open-net capacity in the sea loughs of its western seaboard, in the very estuaries its wild smolts must pass through, and lets the produce be sold to its own people under the word organic. Organic. As though the problem with a sea cage were the feed pellets, and not the open net in the migratory doorway of a collapsing wild population. We have taken the one word most likely to make a shopper relax and stapled it to the practice most of the salmon-literate world is backing away from.

I have tried to work out why Ireland is the outlier, and the honest answer is not wickedness but a kind of institutional inertia dressed up as pragmatism. The farms are in places that have little else. The licensing system is old and slow and hard to reverse. The jobs are real and local, and the harm is diffuse and offshore and belongs to no single constituency that votes. And the wild salmon, for all that we put it on the coins, has no lobby to match the industry’s, only anglers and a few scientists and the occasional stubborn lodge. It is easier to keep signing the licences than to be the minister who stopped.

None of which changes the fact on the packet. Somewhere between the shelf and the truth there is a gap, and the marketing lives in the gap, and it is a wide and comfortable place to live. The next time you are standing in front of that chiller, you do not have to make a scene, or lecture anyone, or even put the packet back. You only have to know what you are looking at, and to know that a good part of the world, looking at the same thing, has quietly decided it can do better.

The fish deserves at least that much thought. It thought its way to the Salmon of Knowledge, after all. The least we can do is read the label.