Why don’t these corporate food guys ever talk about taste?
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Roger That!
I would gladly test this out and report. If only I were Canadian!
There’s multiplier effects at work when you’re looking at the carbon footprint of a complex system. Growing and making the food has a carbon footprint. The fish eats the food and poops, the poop has a carbon footprint. Some amount of food is wasted, the decomposing uneaten food washes downstream, it has a carbon footprint. The fish spends X days in the fish farm before it’s harvested, the fish farm has a carbon footprint per fish-day. And so on. I can see how if you add all the numbers up, you can argue you get a 25x reduction.
eta: as called out by the wikipedia article, if you are growing these special fish in North America vs the usual system of importing farmed fish from Chile or Norway (where most salmon farming happens nowadays), then you have a much reduced transportation carbon footprint. That could well be where they’re getting such big numbers, the footprint of flying fresh fish from fisheries halfway across the globe to supermarkets in North America would be a pretty big CO2 sink.
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This is actually the part that, to me, makes the claim insane. If we divide the carbon footprint of a fish into two categories:
- Those relating to feeding the fish.
- Those not relating to feeding the fish.
In order for any reduction in food requirements to result in a 25 times reduction in carbon footprint would require that category (1) was more than 96% of the carbon footprint of a fish. I don’t know much about raising fish but that’s nuts.
If, as you add in your edit, their estimate is more related to transporting the fish from another place, and only partly related to the reduced food requirement, it might make sense, but then you’d need to qualify that it was massively reduced for Canadian customers, not say:
The product also requires 75% less feed to grow to the size of wild salmon, reducing its carbon footprint by up to 25 times, the company has claimed.
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Feral pigs come to mind
http://www.invasivespecies.wa.gov/priorities/feral_swine.shtml
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Sure, sure. But salmon are picky about spawning. They have trouble getting them to breed in the great lakes, even, and are investing a lot of research into how to convince them to do so more successfully (they are non-native, introduced in the 50’s). Millions are re-stocked every year, and even so the populations the last few years have been crashing.
Salmon make a poor invasive species, for the most part. I’m not super worried about these GM salmon getting out and breeding.
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What could go wrong? LOL. Also is this going to be like farm raised beef; devoid of the very things that make fish “healthy” to eat? Beef that is raised completely on grass, with on feed lot or fattening at the end of its life, has a very good Omega 3 profile.
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… first genetically engineered food animal for sale to humans is a hit with eaters
That headline suggests that GM salmon are very popular with consumers; that people are specifically choosing them. It seems that’s not the case: they’re not labeled as GM and consumers have no idea that they’ve eaten salmon from that source.
“The first genetically modified animals have arrived in the market and Canadian consumers are becoming, unwittingly, the first guinea pigs,” said Thibault Rehn of the group Vigilance OGM.
“The company did not disclose where the GM salmon fillets were sold or for what purpose, and we’re shocked to discover that they’ve entered the market at this time,” said Lucy Sharratt of Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.
Not okay.
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Well, you see, people bought them because they were less expensive. Less expensive things are more popular and therefore people like whatever is done to make things less expensive. All human psychology can be understood through revealed preferences in the marketplace and there’s nothing more complicated about it.
[It deeply saddens me that I must identify this nonsense as sarcasm, but this is the word we live in]
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The fish eats less and it also grows faster. Both factor into reducing the carbon footprint. One third the growing time equals 1/3 the carbon, or a 3x reduction. One quarter the food equals a 4x reduction of dietary-related carbon only, less if the fish are actually eating 75% of normal.
I think you have to assume they are including transportation costs in there or the math doesn’t work. Yes, it’s all marketing bullshit, but they have to get the numbers from somewhere in order to be able to quote a source when someone demands proof.
Depends on how much they’ve had to drink.
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Good point. Probably a lot, considering they drink like fish.
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“The product also requires 75% less feed to grow to the size of wild salmon, reducing its carbon footprint by up to 25 times, the company has claimed.”
um…wild salmon don’t eat feed.
Said the genetically engineered Mermaid.
/me swishes tail
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We need to fight the euphemisms that imply GMO animals are not animals.
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One could posit a GM salmon escaping and being fertile and then somehow, say, interbreeding with some predatory species resulting a hybrid whose accelerated growth would devastate the ecosystem – but perhaps that is getting a little too fanciful.
The particular problem with fish farms I was thinking of was the spread of disease – but it would seem that is a concern with farms in the open water, and suggesting that a landlocked farm would have a similar impact seems like too much of a stretch.
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Yeah, that last bit. I don’t think salmon can breed with non-salmonid species at all, full stop. You’ll see hybrid trout and salmon, char and trout, whitefish and cisco, etc. Maybe a hybrid of a brown trout and one of these would be a super predator?
I looked into it to see if brown x salmon hybrids exist in nature and what they are like, and discovered that the same company produced them and found them to be troublingly resilient:
http://natureinstitute.org/nontarget/reports/atlantic_salmon_002.php
Looks like they scrapped that hybrid plan, lol. Due to different breeding habits, they’re unlikely to ever breed together in nature–I can’t find any reference except for ones specifically bred as hybrids… Brown trout do hang around spawning salmon, but spawn later because they get their own energy for spawning by eating the salmon’s eggs–easy prey.
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Really? I presume they were simply mixed into the supply chain like any other salmon, at the same price and under the same label. The point is that consumers didn’t know they were buying anything different.
