Fish farms

Aqauculture or fish farming can be bad for the environment. Shrimp farms in Asia result in the destruction of mangrove forests, which provide hospitable environments for young fish and prevent coastal erosion. Salmon farming pollutes the ocean with fish poop (Yes, I said poop! Does this make the blog edgy? No?! P**p!!!), excess feed, antibiotics, and other contaminants. It's so bad that the Environmental Defense Fund goes tsk, tsk.

In addition, fish farming could be bad for you. Some studies have found that farmed salmon (particularly from Europe) have higher level of PCBs and other industrial pollutants. Other farmed fishies are probably loaded with anitibiotics, pesticides, and chemicals that promote growth and control disease. (On the plus side, you might save on prescription drug costs. Yay, I guess.) Some farmed fish outside of the US have banned substances, and the FDA barely checks the quality.

It's not all bad, though. If done responsibly, aquaculture can relieve pressure from overfishing, and it does require less energy than raising land animals (the moo'ing kind).

You can sometimes determine the origin of your supermarket fish by looking at the country of origin labeling (COOL). But there's no oversight. For some weird reason, restaurants and fish markets are not required to tell you anything.

Here are some clues that the fish is farmed:

• The packaging brags: "Ocean-raised." Pffft, that's just double-speak for "farmed."
• "Atlantic salmon," farmed. How do I know that? Easy, we killed off the wild population already.
  
• Salmon sold from November to March. It's off-season. Sure, the salmon could be wild, but it's frozen.
  
• Most smoked salmon. But canned Alaskan sockeye (also called pink, red, and blueback) is probably wild.
• Most shrimp, mollusk, catfish, tilapia and trout.