Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of Our Favorite Fish

by Catherine Collins, Douglas Frantz

Overview

A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told.

A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different.

In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet. The authors reveal the conditions inside hatcheries, where young salmon are treated like garbage, and at the farms that threaten our fragile coasts. They draw colorful portraits of characters, such as the big salmon farmer who poisoned his own backyard, the fly-fishing activist who risked everything to ban salmon farms in Puget Sound, and the American researcher driven out of Norway for raising the alarm about dangerous contaminants in the fish. Frantz and Collins document how the industrialization of Atlantic salmon threatens this keystone species, endangers our health and environment, and lines the pockets of our generation's version of Big Tobacco. And they show how it doesn't need to be this way.

Just as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation forced a reckoning with the Big Mac, the vivid stories, scientific research, and high-stakes finance at the heart of Salmon Wars will inspire readers to make choices that protect our health and our planet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250800312
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	982,177
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Douglas Frantz is a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and shared a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent at The New York Times. After his career in journalism, he was chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, and deputy secretary-general at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

Before leaving journalism for a career as a private investigator specializing in international financial fraud, Catherine Collins was a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and a contributor to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Husband and wife, Frantz and Collins have written several nonfiction books together, including Fallout and Celebration, U.S.A.

Before leaving journalism for a career as a private investigator specializing in international financial fraud, Catherine Collins was a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and a contributor to The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She has written several nonfiction books with her husband, Douglas Frantz, including The Man from Pakistan and Death on the Black Sea.
Douglas Frantz is a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and shared a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent at The New York Times. After his career in journalism, he was chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, and deputy secretary-general at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. He has written several nonfiction books with his wife, Catherine Collins, including Fallout and Celebration, U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I BIG FISH EAT LITTLE FISH
Chapter 1 Consolidating the Forces
Chapter 2 Conquering Canada
Chapter 3 Poisoning Your Own Backyard
Chapter 4 The Resistance
Chapter 5 Attack, Counterattack
Chapter 6 Health Matters
Chapter 7 Whom Can You Trust?
Chapter 8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Chapter 9 No Smoking Gun
Chapter 10 Mother Norway
Chapter 11 The Anatomy of Harm
Chapter 12 “Sorry, Guys”
Chapter 13 The Ocean Is Running Out of Fish

PART II IN THE TRENCHES
Chapter 14 “Something Is Seriously Wrong”
Chapter 15 Battling on Multiple Fronts
Chapter 16 Case Closed
Chapter 17 Risky Business
Chapter 18 “We’re Really Proud of Who Hates Us”
Chapter 19 Millions of Dead Salmon
Chapter 20 Keep Your Mouth Shut
Chapter 21 Lobster in the Crosshairs
Chapter 22 “Shit Happens”

PART III THE NEXT WAR
Chapter 23 Saving Wild Salmon
Chapter 24 Preservation on the Penobscot
Chapter 25 Judgment in New York
Chapter 26 Growing Salmon in Florida
Chapter 27 Revolution in Wisconsin
Chapter 28 Now What?

Source Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/11/2022

Erin Brockovich meets Wicked Tuna in this searing exposé from reporters Collins and Frantz (Fallout). Though eating salmon is widely believed to be a responsible and healthy choice, the authors argue that Big Salmon is a powerful industry that prioritizes profits over health—both of the fish and those who consume it. As the authors show, the majority of salmon that reach restaurant or dinner tables are raised in conditions that are harsh, unsanitary, and negatively impact the environment: millions of salmon are reared in cages on massive aquafarms, which pollute underlying seabeds with a layer of slime from “excess feed, chemical residue, and fecal matter” that can reach nearly three feet thick. Scientists, meanwhile, have been trying to sound the alarm about the health risks associated with eating farmed salmon, only to be thwarted by the industry’s “campaign to discredit the criticism.” The authors round things out with suggestions that the USDA, which lacks “standards for what constitutes ‘organic’ salmon,” ought to have some, and should “ramp up oversight.” This stellar investigation is the rare one that has the power to impact policymakers and consumers alike. Agent: David Halpern, Robbins Office. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Bloomberg: The 10 Best Books for Your Summer Reading List

Literary Hub: 29 Works of Nonfiction You Need to Read This Summer

Praise for Salmon Wars

“This excellent book is buoyed by deft portraits of the important players on either side of the nets—poignantly so in regard to some honest scientists whose careers were derailed by industry attacks—and its final chapters describe some hopeful initiatives now in progress.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Salmon Wars is a deep dive into the damage caused by current fish-farming methods to ocean environments, wild fish and their habitats, and the farmed fish themselves. It is also an account of the dismal failure of governments to stop such practices. Salmon farming needs reform. Until it gets it, read this book, and you will never eat farmed salmon again.”

—Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, emerita, at New York University and author of What to Eat

“Erin Brockovich meets Wicked Tuna in this searing exposé…. This stellar investigation is the rare one that has the power to impact policymakers and consumers alike.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Salmon Wars will change the way people look at the supermarket seafood counter. Frantz and Collins pierce the pastoral facade of Big Salmon and show what’s really happening under the water.”

—Bill Taylor, president, Atlantic Salmon Federation

“Impressively researched and absorbingly written, Salmon Wars will compel you to think again about the fish you love to eat so often for dinner. Two highly accomplished investigative reporters dig deep into the global industry behind ocean-farmed salmon, laying bare its environmental dangers, dubious health claims, and dismaying success at obstructing effective regulation. Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins make a powerful case that there are far better options than the ocean cages that supply North Americans with most of their Atlantic Salmon.”

—Martin Baron, former editor of the Washington Post

“Absorbing…A compelling investigation that will leave consumers reevaluating their food choices.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“We have been growing crops unsustainably on the land for at least 100 years. Now we are making the same mistakes with agriculture in our oceans. The criminal multinational fishing corporations and their complicit politicians are actively harming the marine environment and pushing their toxic product to unaware consumers. After reading Salmon Wars, I doubt you will choose to eat net pen farmed salmon again.”

—Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

“Leaping and struggling against the current, dodging hungry bears, mature salmon spawn where they themselves hatched, and then they die. That’s the scene hungry shoppers imagine when they buy slabs of glowing pink fish at the local supermarket. But the reality of how that fish actually reached the table contradicts raw nature.”

—Booklist

“From cigarettes being tossed in a salmon pen to dark murky waters filled with litter, this is how America’s favorite fish are being ‘cared for.’ Salmon Wars will open your eyes to cruelty that parallels puppy mills and all the things we, as Americans, stand against. Frantz and Collins have delivered a book that you will not put down—bravo!”

—Allen Ricca, coauthor of Catching Hell: The Insider Story of Seafood from Ocean to Plate

“In this impeccably researched dive into salmon farming, the authors…provide a searing account of toxic industrial practices, health risks and blatant disinformation. Their portrait of chemical-fed, pathogen-ravaged fish caged in pens (usually marketed as ‘organic,’ ‘sustainable’ and ‘naturally raised’) is convincing and devastating.”

—Maclean’s (Canada)

From the Publisher

After listening to Amy McFadden's narration of this exposé, salmon croquettes may never taste the same. McFadden uses a podcaster- style of storytelling, friendly and righteous, to animate the history of farmed salmon's calculated rise to prominence. It now accounts for 90% of U.S. salmon. Though fish farming is touted as sustainable, these ocean feedlots have the highest mortality rate (1 in 5) of any farmed animal. Besides suffering from parasites and disease, some penned-in fish ingest chemicals, including red dye, to give them "the illusion of health." It's not all gloom and doom, as McFadden's upbeat delivery ends the audiobook with a positive report on efforts to save wild salmon from extinction. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

After listening to Amy McFadden's narration of this exposé, salmon croquettes may never taste the same. McFadden uses a podcaster- style of storytelling, friendly and righteous, to animate the history of farmed salmon's calculated rise to prominence. It now accounts for 90% of U.S. salmon. Though fish farming is touted as sustainable, these ocean feedlots have the highest mortality rate (1 in 5) of any farmed animal. Besides suffering from parasites and disease, some penned-in fish ingest chemicals, including red dye, to give them "the illusion of health." It's not all gloom and doom, as McFadden's upbeat delivery ends the audiobook with a positive report on efforts to save wild salmon from extinction. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

2022-04-08
An investigation of the hidden costs of the salmon-farming industry.

Frantz is a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Collins is a former private investigator. In this absorbing collaboration, the authors take us behind the scenes of the farm-raised salmon industry. According to their research, open-net salmon farms cause damage to the environment and threaten the wild salmon population. Farmed salmon frequently spend their lives in feces-ridden water, are more susceptible to parasites and viruses, and are often treated with dangerous pesticides. “When you eat salmon,” write the authors, “you are consuming all the pollutants and additives to which the fish has been exposed, which are stored in its fat.” In one study, researchers discovered that “farmed salmon contained up to ten times as much cancer-causing chemicals as their wild counterparts.” The authors also discuss the brutal treatment that salmon endure at hatcheries as well as the practice of killing predators that are attracted to the open nets of the salmon farms—sharks, seals, dolphins, and tuna. The authors convincingly demonstrate that the challenge for consumers is the lack of transparency and accountability in the industry. Akin to “Big Tobacco” or “Big Agribusiness,” they note, “Big Fish employs counter-science and public relations campaigns to undermine scientists and environmentalists who challenge its practices and products.” Although the outlook may sound bleak based on the extensive evidence that Frantz and Collins present, they also explore more sustainable commercial-scale salmon farming options, such as land farms and open-ocean farms. By exposing many of the unsavory elements of salmon farming, the authors hope to better educate consumers and encourage more responsible practices. In a closing call to action, the authors also warn that “the giants of the salmon-farming business will not abandon their profitable ways without pressure.”

A compelling investigation that will leave consumers reevaluating their food choices.

Kirkus Reviews