Nobody buys grey salmon - Printable Version +- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com) +-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html) +--- Forum: Food & Recipes (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-121.html) +--- Thread: Nobody buys grey salmon (/thread-637.html)

Nobody buys grey salmon - Magical Realist - Mar 17, 2015 "So distinctive is salmon’s orangey-pink hue that Crayola named a crayon after it. It’s an accurate representation of the flesh of wild salmon, but not that of farmed salmon, whose meat is naturally gray. Or at least, it would be, if salmon farmers didn’t spike their artificial diet with pink-ifying pellets. Wild salmon get their ruddy shade by eating krill and shrimp, which contain a reddish-orange compound called astaxanthin. (That shrimp-heavy diet is also what turns flamingos pink.) The spectrum varies with the species: Since Alaska’s sockeye salmon are closer to the Bering Sea’s teeming krill, they’re the reddest of all. Salmon further south—Coho, king, and pink, for instance—eat relatively less krill and shrimp, giving them a lighter orange hue. Like their wild cousins, farmed salmon come in a spectrum of pinks and oranges, depending on diet. But it’s the farmers—not the food chain—who determine the salmon’s color. Since farm-raised salmon live in a pen, they’re fed kibble made from a hodgepodge that might include the oil and flesh of smaller fish (e.g. herring and anchovies), corn gluten, ground-up feathers, soybeans, chicken fat, and genetically engineered yeast. An essential ingredient in these pellets is astaxanthin. Sometimes it’s made “naturally” through algae or pulverized crustaceans; other manufacturers synthesize the compound in a lab, using petrochemicals. While astaxanthin provides the salmon with some of the vitamins and antioxidants they’d get in the wild, salmon health isn’t the selling point. It’s the “pigmenting,” to use feed industry parlance, that really matters, letting salmon farmers determine how red their fillets will be. (Thanks to a 2003 lawsuit, they have to alert customers to the fact of “added” coloring.)"====http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/the-costliest-part-of-feeding-farmed-salmon-a-pill-that-turns-them-pink/387586/ RE: Nobody buys grey salmon - C C - Mar 20, 2015 Unless ultra-false labeling is legal, for some reason I can't even find farmed salmon around here. Even the generic brand has wild-caught and a lack of "coloring added" in the ingredients. Ah, that's probably it: Never bought the frozen salmon alongside the Vietnamese catfish (swai). Too many years of only processed fish being available causes aisle conditioning to die hard. RE: Nobody buys grey salmon - Mr Doodlebug - Mar 28, 2015 If the colouring is added to the feed, it wouldn't show on the label. Any farm salmon that are fed must have the colourant added to the feed. So long as it is the same chemical as in the shrimp, it wouldn't make much difference. But undoubtedly corporates would choose the cheapest thing possible if left unregulated. The worst fish to eat are varieties of farmed catfish. In the UK these are called Basa, which sounds like Bass. They are white, but have none of the health benefits of white sea fish. About as healthy as a bacon and sausage sandwich, but not as tasty. Look where catfish is You'd be better off eating a cat fed on fish. RE: Nobody buys grey salmon - Mr Doodlebug - Apr 3, 2015 Are grey salmon just older salmon?