The ongoing Frankenfish debate

GM salmon gets a thumbs-up

By Culinate staff

October 17, 2011

Remember genetically modified salmon? It’s been in the news lately, with Congress expressing disapproval of the fish back in June and, this month, the FDA endorsing the product.

The GM fish, if they do hit the consumer market, would be grown inland, not at sea. But most farmed fish, of course, are raised in pens in the ocean — an environmental problem that Food & Water Watch recently summed up in a report condemning both the practice and the federal government’s encouragement of it.

As Clare Leschin-Hoar reported on Grist, “More than half of the seafood consumed worldwide already comes from aquaculture. But domestic aquaculture provides only 5 percent of the seafood we consume; the rest of the farmed seafood we eat comes from parts of the world where there is little to no regulation.” Hence the feds’ interest in increasing domestic participation in offshore fish farming — and the prospect of environmental disasters closer to home.