Name: The salmon dilemma
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T16:57:41.000Z
Duration: 8 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I also eat a lot of other things, which makes me an omnivore, like a lot of people.

Adverbs of manner

But lately I've been wondering, is it even possible to be an omnivore responsibly?

I mean, is it possible to eat meat and still care about this planet?

I've been hearing a lot about farming fish as one of the most sustainable and ethical ways to produce animal protein.

So I decided to do a deep dive on the most consumed fish in the US Salmon.

I personally eat a ton of salmon, and I'm not alone.

The average American consumes 3.2 pounds of salmon a year.

I'll explain the impact it has on our planet and our future, and

maybe most importantly, what it means for the salmon themselves.

But it turns out there's a very real limit to how much wild salmon we can catch sustainably.

We're unfortunately at this state right now where to put it simply, the wild fish stocks are just maxed out or are almost at their sustainability limits.

And to meet the rising demands for seafood, we need to not deplete the oceans anymore.

We need them to be thriving and to be full of biodiversity, and

So if we want to eat salmon at the scale that we do, well, it kind of sounds like it has to come from aquaculture.

Salmon has only been farmed since the 1960s, and it's grown fast.

Since the 80s, global consumption of salmon has tripled, and over 70% of that salmon comes from farms.

So salmon farming takes place in coastal regions around the world.

You know, salmon really like that cold, clean, fresh water where they like to grow best.

That's Sophie Ryan, CEO of Global Salmon Initiative, a collaboration between some of the world's biggest salmon farming companies.

Most salmon is farmed in Norway, Chile, the uk, Canada, and the Faroe Islands.

The process really begins in what we call a freshwater hatchery.

So this is locations on land where the salmon are small eggs and they're monitored closely when they hatch and then put into tanks.

So on land, in fresh water, once they kind of reach maturity, they're transferred out to ocean farms.

So this is those open ocean pens where they're really in that cold, fresh water that they like, and

they stay here until they're ready to harvest, which usually takes about 18 months to two years.

So then when they reach that fully grown stage, they're harvested, taken to a processing facility and then distributed to consumers, restaurants and retailers around the world.

And that's how the world produces almost 3 million tons of salmon each year.

But is it actually more resource effective to farm this much salmon versus other protein like chicken?

To try and answer that, let's start with the big picture.

By current projections, we'll likely need to feed 2 billion more people by 2050.

But how can we do that without further depleting Earth's resources?

Well, some people opt to go vegan for that exact reason.

And recent studies have shown that a plant based diet could lower your climate impact.

And while up to 46% of Americans said they would consider a plant based diet if it helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that still leaves over half the country reliant on animal proteins.

Aquaculture has huge potential to really play a role.

And what that means is it requires less land and less fresh water, and

also has a lower carbon footprint than many of the animal proteins you can get hold of.

But there are other factors related to farming salmon at such a large scale.

It turns out we also need to look at the amount of resources needed to feed the fish.

Here's marine biologist Ray Hilborn a on what it takes to feed all that salmon.

Most of their feed is coming from plants, so typically soy based plants.

The downsides of soy farming have been well documented and honestly, that could be its own video.

To sum it up, soy farming can be a major cause of deforestation, water pollution and biodiversity loss.

And a lot of the demand is driven by a need to feed farm animals.

So for farm raised salmon, this soy based diet is supplemented by feeding them other fish.

There are some fish that are salmon that are raised without any fish meal and fish oil.

But I think most farm salmon use fish meal and fish oil to some extent.

Some of this fish meal does come from fish byproduct and scraps from other fish that have been processed to be eaten.

But most of it comes from wild caught fish that are being caught just to feed the salmon.

So the effects of salmon on the environment ripple out far beyond the farms themselves to the soy farms and fisheries that feed them.

But even still, Professor Hilborn argues that farming salmon is more sustainable than farming other land animals.

So it takes less feed to make a pound of salmon than it takes to produce a pound of chicken.

In other words, despite the impact that salmon feed may have on the environment, it still Takes less of that feed than it would for other livestock.

When you zoom out, salmon aquaculture looks like a better alternative to land based farming and even wild caught salmon.

But there's another dimension to this that might tip the balance.

What is salmon farming like for the salmon themselves?

So, in salmon farming, there are many things that are done to the animals that are invasive.

And so they are handled, they are size graded, they're pumped up into tubes.

That's professor Lynn Sneddon, a researcher who has spent her career studying fish behavior and in particular, answering the question of whether fish can feel pain.

It's a question a lot of us never consider.

The only time they might see them is, you know, in a shop where, you know, they're buying fish to eat.

But for those who do consider whether fish can feel pain, there doesn't seem to be much debate.

So the scientific evidence shows that fishes have nociceptors, receptors for pain, that they have the neural apparatus to detect and process it.

They suspend feeding, they don't behave normally, and

yet when you give them painkillers, we prevent all of those behavioral changes.

So if fish can feel pain, like pigs, cows, chickens, and

other animals that we already farm, what does that change?

Well, it complicates this widely held notion that farming salmon is good for you and for the planet.

On the one hand, we need to feed a growing population that is likely going to remain meat eaters.

And salmon farming is more efficient and less land intensive than a lot of the alternatives.

But knowing that the fish can clearly feel pain and even feel stress makes me think a lot more about their welfare.

Especially given the fact that salmon farming requires catching other wild fish to feed to the salmon.

And like any other form of animal farming, there are repercussions.

Salmon farms pose threats to various marine organisms through transmission of parasites like sea lice diseases in some case.

And there have also been cases where salmon escape the pens and interbreed with fish in the local ecosystem as an invasive species.

It was these reasons that led to the banning of net pens in Washington state just this year.

In the end, I think there's unfortunately, this very real trade off between sustainability and ethics, because feeding a growing population responsibly will often come at the expense of the animals involved.

But I also think there's a silver lining, because the conditions that those animals are in can improve.

Over the last 20 years, pressure from the public and politicians impacted the egg industry when people became widely aware of the factory farm conditions that chickens lived in.

And maybe a similar mindset can be adopted for farming fish.

Fish welfare is so critically important because we're raising animals.

You know, we want healthy fish in healthy water.

So by safeguarding the welfare of fish, I think it benefits everyone, whether you care about the fish themselves or not.

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The salmon dilemma

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