Green Daily

Avoiding food that comes from a farm sounds silly. Except when it comes to fish.

Farm-raised fish (sometimes referred to as ocean-raised) are fish in pens in the ocean that don't get lots of swimming room. This means, according to Delicious Organics, that they are prone to disease (and therefore fed antibiotics) and can get out and infect the fish in the wild. They are also high in mercury.

A Consumer Reports article goes into a lot more detail on the issue, but the nitty gritty is this: Results of a study led by an environmental chemist at Indiana University showed that farmed salmon tended to have higher levels of PBDEs, flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, than wild salmon. PBDEs have become ubiquitous in the environment and appear to have found their way into farmed-fish feed. They have posed neurological problems in animals; their toxicity in humans isn't known. The study also revealed that, compared with wild salmon, farmed salmon had more PCBs and dioxins, likely carcinogens. On its own, each contaminant was well below the FDA's tolerance level. But some samples had combined concentrations high enough to trigger local consumption advisories.

As for me, I just go wild.

Skip ahead

• What does Fair Trade really mean?
• Heard of rBHG? You should
• How does eating meat affect the planet?