< Back to Front Page Text size – +

Whole Foods and farmed fish

Email|Link|Comments (1) Posted by Devra First July 17, 2008 01:23 PM

At Pigeon Cove, Whole Foods' seafood facility in Gloucester.

Yesterday Whole Foods implemented stricter guidelines for its farmed fish. (Read a recent Globe story on salmon here to see why this is important.)

The market already prohibited antibiotics, added growth hormones, preservatives such as sulfites, poultry and mammalian byproducts in feed, and genetically modified or cloned seafood.

Here's what's new:

Fish farmers now must work to minimize their impact on the environment, protecting sensitive habitats, monitoring water pollution, and sourcing feed ingredients responsibly.

They have to pass third-party audits and provide detailed information on their practices.

Fish and shrimp must be traceable from hatchery to pond to processing plant.

Toxic chemicals such as malachite green and organophosphate pesticides are verboten.

Though there's no mention of emamectin benzoate (used to control sea lice) or synthetic pigments (fed to farmed salmon to turn them pink), these are comparatively rigorous standards. If Whole Foods shows other retailers that keeping an eye on food safety can be a good business move, hopefully more will follow suit.

< Back to Front Page

1 comments so far...

I've always wondered about the health qualities of farm-raised fish. The healthy basis for eating fish has been based on eating wild swimming and caught (free range sort of), which have a diet of eating other live fish. Krill or the like. Fish that are raised in the ocean but in a pen do not have the same diet or population pressure. Farm raised salmon have to be treated with artificial ingredients to have a pink flesh. I find it difficult to believe that fish fed a diet of food pellets and crowded together for most of their lives have the same good food qualities for humans.

Posted by Mike July 17, 08 04:27 PM