Last year the catch of wild salmon in Scotland's rivers was the lowest since records began. The Salmon and Trout Association is blaming the decline on the commercial fishery for sand-eels, on which the young salmon feed before returning to their rivers. Why are the sand-eels being fished anyway? To feed intensively kept pigs and poultry and farmed salmon.
While wild salmon are in drastic decline, the salmon farming industry is in a desperate plight because it insists on producing too much of the stuff, at 4.5 tonnes of sand-eels to every tonne of salmon harvested. They can't get rid of it, even at the modest prices it sells at in the shops. No amount of marketing seems able to push consumption further. The truth, although salmon producers can't see it, is that salmon is a rich, cloying fish, to be eaten only five or six times in a summer as a treat, and then forgotten until next year.
As with battery chicken, farmed salmon are raised unnaturally quickly to a standard weight, on a standard diet. We don't buy as much of it as the salmon farmers would like, but why do we buy it at all? One reason, I suppose, is that in this country we have got used to having all sorts of formerly seasonal foods available all year round. Choosing from a restaurant menu or shopping for a dinner party, we expect to choose salmon and strawberries as easily in February or October as in the early summer of which they used to be the bounty. All too often, British taste-buds don't seem to notice that the former delicacy has come to taste of lightly flavoured water.
Then comes the stage when the real thing isn't available, even in season: when strawberries are always tasteless, flabby red hearts and salmon is always an exact shade of pink, chosen from a shade card (honestly: that's how they regulate the addition of dye to the powdered sand-eels).
This blanket mediocrity all but smothered pork and poultry production. There has been a revival of traditional rearing methods for those, on grounds of both taste and animal welfare. Could the same thing be happening with salmon?
The salmon industry's present troubles perhaps indicate that it is.
Salmon farming, like all other forms of factory farming, is big business, and if it collapses people lose jobs. But spare a thought for the farmed, as well as the farmers. The truth is that they are routinely stocked at 12 large salmon per cubic metre, swimming ceaselessly round their net prisons, unable to survive their close confinement without constant drugging and disinfecting.
So go for salmon in season, which it is now. If it isn't labelled wild, it is farmed.
