Salmon - a lost pleasure?

Salmon, unceremoniously plonked and piled in the supermarket chill display.  It's cheap, it's abundant, it's portioned, it's colourful, it's easy, it's available. But according to Tasmanian author and Booker Prize winner, Richard Flanagan, it's toxic.
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Salmon was once a special-occasion food, wild caught and seasonal.  Before salmon farming began (Norway c. 1975) smoked wild salmon served in hotels and restaurants was handled like gold. The salmon was weighed, the weight recorded in a book. The required  slices were removed and plated, possibly draped across some Iceberg lettuce with a twisted slice of lemon and an onion ring.  The salmon was then re-weighed and the weight recorded.  It was precious. Handled with awe and respect,  staff in "cold larder"  would never dare to sneak a snack. 
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Years later, I might be making up sandwiches for my nieces, their primary school packed lunches, with left-overs (farmed salmon) from a catering job  "Oh Cathy, not smoked salmon again!," they whinged.
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Like chicken, salmon has become an industrialised product, the process touted as feeding a hungry world, affordable and  easy to prepare.  In reality, the cost could be  just too great.

So what has brought on this soul searching? Our Gastronomy Book Club is going well.  We meet monthly and the glass of wine and a few cashews has grown to mini banquets.  We're helpless to resist. Our readings have ranged from romantic, foodie memoirs where tables groan with platters, platters brim with abundance and food bursts with flavour  to hard hitting, thought provoking, often angry diatribes.

This month we're reading the newly released Toxic and seeing the underbelly of the  salmon farming industry. Flanagan calls farmed salmon "a highly artificial, chromosomally manipulated, dyed, fatty protein  with decreasing omega-3 levels". He challenges the image promoted by the industry of idyllic pristine Tasmanian waters producing a clean, green, and healthy product.

• A Healthy Food? Because of its diet, farmed salmon is no longer the fabulous source of omega-3 oil, the good oil. It's been unbalanced by omega-6, the baddie. Then there are the chemicals with big, unknowable names - like ethoxyquin which is only there to ensure that fishmeal doesn’t self-combust in transport. Farmed fish has grey flesh which is dyed with astaxanthin to create its appetising colour, (in Australia, we prefer shade no. 33, a really deep orange). The antibiotics are there also, 75% of which are not metabolised by the fish and end up in the waters. 
• Piscatarian? You prefer not to eat meat? Fish-feed pellets also contain the crushed carcasses of chicken, sheep and cows.
• Clean? Heavily stocked fish live in a vertical soup of faeces, ammonia and uneaten food which in turn, promotes excessive algae. The water is thick with the sludge, as are the beaches.
• Pristine waters? Industrial noise on water and land is a constant, 24 hours a day. Flotsam of rigid, broken plastic pipes, large bags and rope dangerously litter the water, as well as the sea-shore.
• Sealife? Waterways that crawled with life (seals, dolphin, whales) are now losing their variety and abundance. The unique (and very cute) red handfish is down to a count of eighty.
• Globally Sustainable? 1.73K of wild fish are required to make 1K of salmon. We are creating protein by stealing from others. The holier-than-thou soybean used in the feed is linked  to massive deforestation and slave-like working conditions in South America.
• Employment? – 99% of Tasmanians are not employed by this so-called major industry.
• Corruption? Would you believe it of government? And the last straw, the RSPCA endorses the product and receives a  financial contribution.

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Left: CM's Coulibiac, painstakingly done with the herbed pancake enclosing the fish. (19thC Limoges)
Right: My Coulibiac, a bit of a quickie but delicious, nonetheless. (1930s Royal Copenhagen)

Finding sources of wild-caught Alaskan, Canadian or Scottish salmon seems  extreme. So are we going to find alternates? I'll miss a sliver of smoked salmon on a crouton with sour cream and capers, and some salmon roe topping a runny omelette or a steamed Japanese savoury custard.  I love the Lebanese tahini, yoghurt,  walnut, red onion sauce on a whole fillet of salmon but most of all, will I find an alternative for the Coulibiac - a classic French dish copied from the Russian Kulibiaka, (when the two countries adored each other)?

Is the book a wake-up call, exposing an environmental disaster, a suspect food product, corporate corruption and a failure of governance or is it leftie, subversive rubbish, from old green hippies protecting their holiday shacks? Or will we simply say ""Yes but...  it's so convenient."
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In my restaurant days, we ate many left-overs. Today, I couldn't face another spoon of Marquise au Chocolat but I never tired of salmon. But, I won't be eating it again. I'd rather eat the peanuts from a bar room floor.

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