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I like eating meat. I love it. A nice bit of flesh. Yum yum.
But after the endless horrors of BSE, battery farming, and growth hormones, even
I have considered going veggie.
But one thing has always held me back
Salmon.
Free-range, organic, healthy, tasty, cheap, and pink. The King
of the Sea. And every week, the king of my dinner plate. Can't give it up. Won't
give it up.
Until this week's exposure of the horrors of the salmon farming
industry.
Picture a salmon. See their muscular bodies arching sexily through
the water. Flinging themselves down a highland stream. Struggling meatily on the
end of weathered Scottish fishermen's tackle.
Forget that. Instead picture the same salmon intensively farmed
in an undersea cage, spending its life swimming round in tiny circles alongside
250,000 other salmon. Artificial lights shine in 24 hours to accelerate the fishes'
growing cycles.
The lovely pink colour of its flesh - that isn't natural. It's
chemical. The Swiss drug company, Roche, produce a handy colour chart called Salmofan,
that lets fish farmers pick the pigment they fancy and then sprinkle it into the
salmon cage.
And what do these hormone and vaccine packed fish eat? Yep, pellets
of - wait for it - dead fish. Sound familiar? This diet of fish cadaver is also
rich in PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) - exactly the sort of marine pollutants
that have been found to give people cancer. Great.
And, according to WWF, the level of pollution from fish farms
on the west coast of Scotland is comparable to the sewage output of 9.4 million
people.
Predictably, many of these farms are massive enterprises owned
by multinational corporations. They're not out to breed fish for human consumption.
They're here to create a cheap flesh-based product, artificially coloured so it
cuts a dash on a bed of rocket.
As a former hatchery worker from Inverness said recently: "If
people knew all the things we did to make them grow they would never go near salmon
again."
It pisses me off that profit is coming between me and the simple
pleasure of a tasty bit of fish.
So that's it. No more salmon. No more flesh. After a lifetime
of flesh-eating, I'm on the rabbit food.
by Jake | 12th January
01
related links:
how
the king of fish is being farmed to death »
seethru
talk: that's it - I'm becoming vegetarian »
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