How to Prepare Alaska Salmon for Christmas

Since it’s the season to give, we thought we’d share with you our favorite Alaska salmon recipe.  This is the best recipe for readying Alaska salmon for your Christmas dinner, but it’s probably not what you think…

Step #1 – pour 100 salmon eggs into a large plastic tray. Culture for about 2 months.

Step #2 - after the eggs hatch, add a pinch of commercially available fish feed. This diet will contain beta-carotenes that are healthy for the baby salmon and also turn the flesh a nice red colour. Continue this process for another 3 months.

Step #3 –  when the baby salmon are large enough and feeding well, move them carefully from the freshwater hatcheries to the saltwater fish farms to continue growing. Be careful not to spill.

Step #4 – add more fish feed and continue growing the salmon in net pens for 2 to 12 months. If your salmon doesn’t feel well, order some drugs to make it feel better (don’t worry, that happens a lot in Alaska). Hint : the longer and larger you can grow your salmon, the better chance it has to out-compete wild salmon.

Step #5 – let your salmon go. It may die, but that’s OK, cause there are 99 more right behind it. And don’t worry about the fact that your salmon is eating fish in the ocean not meant for it or that your salmon may hump other wild salmon and eradicate them – it happens all the time in Alaska – it’s called ocean ranching.

Step #6 – when your salmon returns a few years later, catch it, tell your dinner guests it’s wild and serve it with a squeeze of lemon and pinch of basil.

Serving Size – Due to the fact that 96% of the 100 baby salmon you released will die, this meal only serves a family of four. If you would like to serve millions, then simply add more eggs. Try 1.5 billion – why not – the state of Alaska does it. Don’t you worry if there isn’t enough food in the ocean or if you erase the gene pool of natural wild salmon! If no one else cares, then why should you?

Not quite what you were expecting, huh?

Merry Christmas from ‘The Truth About Alaska Salmon’!

Randy Hartnell Isn’t a Friend of Wild Salmon

If an animal is on the ‘endangered’ list, do scientists ever recommend that we eat the animal at risk? Of course not. How stupid would that be – well, read on!

Randy Hartnell, lobbyist for anything fishy and Alaskan, recently admitted that “the planet’s wild fisheries are under great pressure right now and our oceans are in trouble.” Now, he probably should have stopped talking at that point because his next comment kinda exposes the fact that he is in the business of selling wild fish;

What did you say Randy?

…”the truth is that to save wild salmon…we have to choose to eat them.” 

Randy – wtf?  Did you fall asleep during that important ecology class that explained when a species is at risk, the last thing you should do is kill it and eat it? 

So, both the state of California and Oregon have shut down their salmon fishery, but Randy is still puts his pocket book in front of the survival of salmon. Nice Randy, real nice.

What’s the Secret to Catching Fish in Alaska?

A local rag in Juneau, Alaska, recently printed a full page ad asking readers, “What’s the secret to catching fish in Alaska”?

Oh, oh, teacher, can we answer that one!

To catch a fish in Alaska, why don’t you just hang out next to one of the state run hatcheries (like the one in the photo below) and wait for 80 million hatchery released salmon to return like boomerangs. You see, these cultured salmon aren’t supposed to return to actual rivers. As long as their compass is working they’ll return to the same place where they were hatched, fed and released. 

Hidden Falls Salmon Ranching Hatchery

These ‘boomerangs’ are actually referred to as ranched salmon. Ranched salmon account for over 30% of the annual salmon catch in Alaska.

Call us ‘brown nosers’ or ‘teacher’s pet’, but we think we deserve an A+ for nailing that one!

Is Dr. Joseph Mercola a farmed fish expert?

Who the hell is Dr. Joseph Mercola and why is he giving some pretty uneducated personal opinion on “what you need to know about farmed fish“?

Well, it turns out the self prescribed ‘good doctor’ is promoting Alaskan seafood by attacking the competition.  He not only recommends to his faithful to eat Alaskan salmon, but he goes so far as to provide a brand name – Vital Choice Seafood.

His diatribe follows the typical formula of attack.  Let’s take a few of his statements about farm-raised fish and see how Alaska ranched salmon (ranched salmon from Alaska are the main source of salmon for Vital Choice) stack up; 

• “it takes 1.9 kg of wild fish to produce 1 kg of farm-raised fish”

The truth – due to new diets in feed, it now takes about 1 .2 kg of wild fish to produce farmed fish. Alaska ranched salmon eat wild fish too and the conversion ratio is far less efficient than farming.

• “higher levels of PCB’s and mercury to be higher in farm-raised fish than wild fish”

The truth – PCB and mercury levels are so low in both wild and farmed salmon that it’s almost undetectable. But, if you really want to know, the highest levels of PCBs have been found in wild Sockeye salmon from Alaska’s Copper River  (Ewald et al. 1998). Levels of mercury are the lowest in farmed salmon.

• “farm-raised fish is pumped full of antibiotics, hormones and even chemicals to change their colour”

Wrong, wrong and…wrong. Hey doc, you kinda suck!  Antibiotics are only used on farm-raised fish when a fish is sick (a guy who prescribes drugs for a living should know this). Hormones are not used and the ‘colour’ that he refers to is the red pigment that colours a salmon’s flesh.  This pigmentation process is the same for wild and farmed salmon – carotenoid pigments are in their feed source and salmon simply retain the red colour (kinda like if we ate a ton of carrots then we’d turn orange).

Dear Dr. Mercola; I guess your uneducated opinion is protected by the disclaimer on your website that says “these statements have not been evaluated…”.  

Idiot.

Wal-Mart Selling Alaska Wild Salmon…BIG DEAL!

When it comes to salmon, it’s truly amazing what makes the news. The “Juneau Empire” recently wrote about Wal-Mart jumping on the Alaska seafood marketing blitz – Wal-Mart is selling Alaska salmon from Bristol Bay.

Big friggin’ deal.

And it seems as though bloggers below the article in the Empire agree. ‘al7kz’ comments, “The only thing missing from this article is ‘Paid Advertisenent’ at the top“.  We couldn’t agree more.

The photo above is just another example of the false advertising so prevalent from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Council. When over 40% of the salmon in Alaska are born in hatcheries and bred to out-compete with natural, wild salmon – then it ain’t wild.