Stacks of salmon steaks and fillets remained on ice at Chapel Street Market in Islington, north London on Friday last week.
Only weeks ago they were disappearing at a record rate, destined for millions of festive dinner tables. Now shoppers flashed a concerned glance and passed by. Farmed fish was having its mad cow moment.
Just as research into bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, prompted an EU ban and shoppers' boycott of British beef almost eight years ago, now public confidence was being rocked in the very foodstuff nutritionists have been telling us we must eat more of.
Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, is no stranger to health scares. Rarely has a month passed in recent years without a TV program or a feature in a magazine raising concerns about aquaculture, the fastest-growing sector of the global food economy. But last Friday was something different.
This was not some fringe pressure group or band of tree-hugging environmentalists out to rattle cages. It was some of the world's leading experts on industrial pollution.
And what they had to say was devastating: farmed salmon was poisonous. What's more, the most dangerous of all were raised in Scotland.
Researchers based at the University of Albany in New York revealed in the journal Science how they found high levels of contaminants such as PCBs, dioxins and pesticides in Scottish fish, which is marketed around the world as a premium product. Eating more than three portions a year, they warned, risked increasing the consumer's chances of developing cancer.
In Britain, 99 percent of salmon sold in fishmongers and supermarkets comes from Scottish farms. They moved swiftly to assuage customer fears but the impact of the findings already appears to have been powerful. Across the UK this weekend sides of smoked pink fish, "fresh from the crystal clear waters of Scotland," sat untouched on shelves alongside curiosities such as salmon nuggets and tikka bites.
Staff in one branch of Tesco near Glasgow estimated that the store was shifting less than half its usual stock of farmed fish.
Back at the Islington market in London, Jamie Curtis revealed that sales had nosedived.
"I've had people coming up to me all day," Curtis said.
"A lot of customers have been saying that since hearing the news about the risks associated with eating salmon they're going to give it up for good," he said.
On hearing details of the US research, one shopper considered ditching her purchase. Nicola Burn, a 30-year-old teacher, said: "If I had known about it I'm not so sure I would have put this packet of salmon in my basket. I'll definitely be reading the labels on fish more carefully from now on," she said.
Reactions like this will distress Scottish fish farmers as they begin the mammoth task this week of attempting to rebuild public trust.
For them -- and for Britain's baffled consumers -- further confusion and uncertainty lie ahead.
The intensity of their reaction to the revelations is a clear indication of just how worried fish farmers are. In Scotland alone the business is worth ?700 million (US$1.28 billion) and supports more than 6,500 jobs -- mainly in remote areas with a history of high unemployment.
safety claims
The country's 300 salmon farms produce 160,000 tonnes of fish a year. Industry representatives insisted farmed salmon was safe and claimed the US team's report was misleading. They called on support from the British government's Food Standards Agency and politicians, who are well aware that aquaculture accounts for half of the value of all Scottish food exports.
Much of the blame for the high contamination readings has been heaped on the feed used to raise the fish. Environmentalists have long criticized this aspect of the industry as it relies on wild fish being caught and ground into pellets to feed their captive cousins. They have pointed out that it takes three tonnes of wild fish to produce one tonne of the farmed variety. It is, therefore, fundamentally an unsustainable industry.
Now the research published in Science suggests that this feed, harvested from the polluted waters of the North Sea, results in the fish farmed in the area being more contaminated than those elsewhere.
Aquaculture critics had already pointed out that the polluted waters of the northern hemisphere produce farmed fish with contamination levels eight times greater than those in the southern hemisphere farms of Chile, Australia and Africa.
The world's largest producer of salmon feed is EWOS, based in Bathgate, West Lothian, Scotland. Managing director Neil Spreckley defended the business and said it was constantly seeking to improve methods.
"Industrial pollution is not as bad as it was 20 or 30 years ago. The raw materials going into fish feed have improved. We are trying to formulate more ingredients which are lower in PCBs and dioxins such as soya and linseed vegetable oils. The problem is that salmon's natural diet is to eat fish," he said.
And that, say anti-aquaculture campaigners, is the problem with the entire industry. What we are witnessing with salmon now will be replicated across the dozens of other carnivorous species being reared in captivity around the world.
Projections indicate that by 2020 more farmed fish will be eaten than those caught in the wild. Already aquaculture is worth more than US$54.74 billion a year globally and the number of species being developed is rapidly increasing.
Like salmon and trout, the vast majority of sea bass and bream consumed in Britain comes from farms. Mediterranean countries such as Greece have raced ahead in the production of such species that require warmer waters. Tuna is also being developed, and the Japanese have even floated the idea of a huge minke whale farm.
sustainable farming
In Britain and in Norway, though, all eyes are on halibut and cod -- the great hope of aquaculture. Proponents say that both offer the prospect of cleaner, more sustainable farming than salmon.
One person who won't be serving any of them, however, is Jackie MacKenzie, who worked at a fish farm in the northwest of Scotland for three years in the 1990s before quitting over concerns that the chemicals he was using were having a detrimental effect upon his health.
"There used to be fresh salmon on the table when I was a boy," MacKenzie said.
"But that was a different fish to what we get now. I wouldn't feed my children the stuff that comes out of these farms," he said.
He claimed that the aquaculture industry had taken a quality product and turned it into "gunk." Wild salmon, he said, was a firm, muscular, healthy fish. What now masqueraded as the king of fish was a flabby, dyed-pink beast that bore little resemblance to its wild relative.
He warned that it was inevitable that other species would develop problems in captivity.
"All fish have their diseases, and when you cram lots of them into a confined space it is inevitable the disease will spread. Then chemicals are introduced in an attempt to control things," he said.
Along with feed and chemicals, MacKenzie lists escaping fish as one of the main, unavoidable problems of sea-cage fish farming. Wherever there are fish in captivity, there are jailbreaks. Inevitably, wild populations are affected.
A Pacific salmon from farms in contaminated waters off the northwest coast of Russia was recently found in Scotland.
Diseases are passed on, and cross-breeding has resulted in deformities and genetic mutations that have seen a stark drop in wild salmon stocks since farms arrived in Scotland in the late 1970s.
MacKenzie and other anti-aquaculture campaigners welcome the Albany report, claiming that for years they were seen as crackpots standing in the way of progress.
"Finally the concerns we have are being recognized by others," said the ex-fish farmer.
The revelations in the journal Science came as it was revealed that 27 imports of smoked salmon were last year condemned by the powerful US government watchdog, the Food and Drug Administration, as unfit for human consumption following random checks.
These included 15 shipments of smoked salmon which were turned away because they were contaminated with listeria, and a further nine salmon shipments from Scotland which were classified as "insanitary."
In Britain, 1 million Scottish-farmed salmon per week were sold during the Christmas period. Thousands more trout, sea bass, sea bream and cod that lived and died in captivity were also eaten. None, however, passed the MacKenzie family's lips. It appears that many more families are now following their lead.
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