In truth, we had not thought much about that small salmon farm in the years that followed. Like many people, we bought “fresh Atlantic salmon” from Whole Foods, Costco, and other markets. “We were busy at work and raising three kids, so we hoped that the marketing hype that salmon was healthy and naturally raised was accurate.”

To find the answers, we did what we had done throughout our careers – we investigated.

Both of us have extensive backgrounds as newspaper reporters and as professional investigators. After 37 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Doug became chief investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009. Catherine took the skills she developed as a reporter and prize-winning foreign correspondent into a new field and became a private investigator specializing in international financial fraud about the same time.

By 2020, we had already written several books together on topics ranging from the Holocaust at sea to nuclear weapons trafficking. We applied our collective skills to the salmon farming industry. We interviewed scientists, physicians, fishers, activists, and those in the business of aquaculture. We read academic studies and court papers and uncovered previously undisclosed criminal files. We traveled to salmon farms at sea and on land. The result was Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of Our Favorite Fish, which was published in July 2022.

The book tells compelling stories of people on both sides of the net, but our findings can be summarized in the answers we found to three critical questions swirling around the $20-billion-dollar global salmon farming industry.

First and most important, is eating farmed salmon healthy? Doctors recommend salmon for protein, nutrients, and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. The American Heart Association suggests consuming at least two servings of fish a week. But they rarely spell out the kind of salmon you should eat or warn of the dangers from fish that spend their lives swimming in their own feces and being doused with pesticides and antibiotics.

Many experts and scientific studies cast doubt on the blanket claim that salmon should be part of a healthy diet when the fish comes from open-net farms. Some farmed salmon may be safer than other types, but consumers rarely have enough information to make that choice.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t even have a definition for organic salmon. This is not a new problem. As early as 2004, scientists found levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, a probable carcinogen known as PCBs, seven times higher in farmed Atlantic salmon than in wild salmon. More recent studies found high levels of other chemicals and antibiotics in farmed salmon. Toxins often wind up in salmon flesh and accumulate in people who eat the fish.

Some studies warn that a single meal per month of farmed Atlantic salmon can expose consumers to contaminant levels exceeding standards from the World Health Organization. The risk is greatest for infants, children, and pregnant women because of the potential harm from contaminants to developing brains.

Second, is farmed salmon sustainable? Salmon farmers advertise their fish as naturally raised and a solution to the global protein shortage. These assertions are deceptive.

Twenty-five percent or more of the feed for farmed salmon comes from anchovies, sardines, mackerel, herring, and other small forage fish that should be eaten by people, not fish. Huge trawlers pillage the fisheries off the coast of West Africa and Peru, robbing subsistence fishers of their livelihood and increasing food insecurity. Put in the starkest terms, the United Kingdom charity Wildfish.org estimates that 440 small, wild fish are ground into fish meal to feed a single farmed salmon to reach market weight.

The best estimates we found were that 20 to 25 percent of farmed salmon die every year before they can be harvested. Feedlot cattle die at a rate of 3.5 percent a year; factory chickens, 5 percent.

Finally, do salmon farms harm the environment? You be the judge.

The fish spend two to three years in open-net-pen farms that contain up to a million salmon jammed into 10 or 12 cages. The pens extend 30 feet below the surface and are anchored to the seabed. The cages are petri dishes for tiny parasites called sea lice and many viruses that kill farmed fish and endanger wild salmon when currents carry them outside the farms.

Massive doses of pesticides, including banned neurotoxins, and antibiotics are deployed against parasites and pathogens. Some of the residue winds up in the salmon flesh, some of it falls to the seabed below the cages. Untreated waste from excess feed, decomposing fish, excrement, and chemical residue forms a toxic stew that kills lobsters and drives away marine life for hundreds of yards. One photo we found showed a yardstick stuck to the 32-inch mark in slime beneath a salmon farm. Interestingly, the salmon industry’s attack on our book focused on that photo. Industry flaks claimed the picture was either faked or taken near a trout farm. We knew the where, when and who of that photo, and we had the documentation to prove it.

The attempt to discredit the photo was part of a campaign conducted by industry representatives against our book. The efforts echoed attacks on the scientists who exposed the toxins in farmed salmon back in 2004 and on almost every critic of the industry since. Did the industry answer our questions before we published the book? No. They refused repeated requests for interviews and information, preferring to respond after the fact through paid representatives and the captive industry press.

Since the book’s publication a year ago, we have remained involved in the campaign to get open-net-pen salmon farms out of the water. There are plenty of other fish from which to choose. And if you want to stick with salmon, we believe that land-based salmon farms are a healthier and more environmentally friendly way to meet the global demand for salmon. Profits are too high and accountability too low for the open-net-pen industry to change on its own. Consumers must be willing to take this inferior fish off the table for the sake of the planet and its people.