A MAD Guide for the Perplexed: Salmon

The first in a series designed to help you made good decisions about vexing ingredients

Salmon by Sofie (Kampmark, of course)...

Avocados. Bluefin. Quinoa. Beef. Chocolate. Caviar. It’s a complicated jungle out there for anyone trying to navigate the sustainability of a number of ingredients. So we’re launching an ongoing series intended to help chefs and restaurateurs cut through the thicket of competing claims, confusing information, and plain old bullshit surrounding some foods. In each edition, we’ll explore some of the key questions and issues, give some pointers on what to look for, and talk to chefs about how and why they’ve made the decisions they have. For this month’s issue, we thought we’d take a page from MAD7, and start with salmon.

Ask anyone who attended Symposium which talks affected them the most, and the chances are good they’ll start gushing about The Icelandic Girls. Andrea Hermó∂sdóttir, Alexandra Hermó∂sdóttir, Arndís Árnadóttir and Áslaug Árnadóttir were the unexpected rock stars of MAD7: seventh-generation salmon fishing guides who they told us, with a confidence most of us could only dream about when we were their age, about the profound threat posed by salmon farming to their family tradition, their river, and the wild species itself. They concluded their talk with a clear message for the hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs in the audience: stop serving salmon farmed in open sea pens.

It was a bold call to action. Salmon is one of the most popular and heavily consumed fish in the world, and 70% of it comes from aquaculture. Last year, 2.8 million tons of Atlantic salmon–the most popular variety– was produced through farming, generating some 15.4 billion dollars and employing over 132,000 people worldwide. Farmed salmon has also been successfully marketed as a healthier and more sustainable alternative to meat, one that helps provide the world’s growing demand for protein without exacerbating the problem of overfishing.

When you consider the social and economic forces behind it—to say nothing of how consumers have acquired a powerful taste for its mild flavor and fatty texture–farmed salmon seems pretty entrenched in the modern diet. So what is a chef who cares both about sustainability and keeping guests happy to do?

Lice, Jailbreaks, and Other Unpleasant Things to Contemplate

Judging the sustainability of almost any product is always complicated, and in the case of farmed salmon, it seems especially complex. It is true, for example, that farmed salmon has a relatively low carbon footprint—producing a kilo of the fish emits about 4 kilos of greenhouse gases, compared with chicken’s 6.5 and beef’s 30. It is also true that farmed salmon has a relatively low feed conversion rate (it takes roughly 1.2 kilos of feed to produce a kilo of farmed salmon), which is another metric used in assessing sustainability.

But farmed salmon comes with big, problematic factors that stem from the system in which it is raised. Open pen farms are essentially giant nets suspended in the sea. In Norway, which is the world’s largest salmon producer, they average up to 60 meters across and 50 meters deep, and hold as many as 200,000 salmon a piece. Because sea water flows freely in and out of them, the pens better replicate the salmon’s natural habitat (if salmon naturally liked to live in the same density to one another as, say, humans in New York City). But if the water goes in and out, so too does the salmon’s waste, along with any chemicals and medicines used to treat them. Add in feed whose components can be problematic, and that often contains an additive that tints the farmed salmon’s light flesh the enticingly deep pink of wild (you really do choose your level of color as if it were a paint sample, just like the Icelandic girls describe), and the kinds of contamination multiply.

Salmon Pantone is really a thing...

Open pens aren’t so great for the sea in general, but they’re especially not good for salmon. For one thing, the density of fish inside the pens makes it easier for parasites called salmon lice to thrive (salmon lice aren’t actually lice–they’re teeny tiny crustaceans, not insects–but they’re nasty enough critters that no one seems to care about the misnomer). Salmon lice consume the mucus and skin of the fish, which can leave the salmon with wounds severe enough to kill it. In Norway, the average mortality rate from sea lice is 15%, and can reach as high as 30% in some parts of the country.

And those critters don’t stay put, either. With open pens, it’s easy for the lice to jump to any wild salmon that happen to be passing by. Often, they don’t even need to jump themselves–they can just sit back and be carried to the wild populatio, because the other big problem with open pens is that salmon inside them often escape. 81,000 made a break for freedom from a farm in Iceland in 2021; 80,000 from a Scottish farm in 2023; 27,000 from one in Norway just this past February. And those are just the big, attention-grabbing bustouts; on average some 200,000 salmon escape each year in Norway.

Those jail-breakers don’t just spread parasites. Once those freedom-loving former captives start mating with their wild counterparts, they share their weaker, no-predators-and-all-the-fishmeal-I-can-eat genes as well. Along with climate change, the two factors of salmon lice mortality and gene contamination have combined to dramatically reduce wild populations of North Atlantic salmon. In Iceland, the stocks have declined 75% since 1970; in Great Britain, they are projected to fall 50-80% between 2010 and 2025; in Norway, they were at historic lows in 2024, having fallen 50% since the 1980s.

“With the right knowledge, you can find the good ones”

As a sushi chef and committed conservationist, Hajime Sato has an intimate relationship with the problem of what to do about salmon. Both Sozai, his James Beard award-winning restaurant in Detroit (which recently closed) and before that, his Seattle restaurant, Mashiko, featured sustainable sushi, which meant Hajime was constantly trying to balance his environmental concerns with his guests’ insatiable desire for the fatty fish. “Sometimes it’s a battle between what you want and what they want,” he says. “At a crazy great Michelin restaurant, you can get the customers to obey the chefs, but unfortunately, 99.9% of restaurants, including me, cannot really do that; we have to satisfy the demand of the customers.”

And when it comes to sushi, customers want their sake nigiri (that salmon was never traditionally used in Japan and only became a stalwart of the sushi menu when the Norwegian seafood industry began pushing its surplus is an irony not lost on him). So Hajime does a lot of research and sources the best salmon he can–which has included wild chum salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and farmed Chinook salmon from New Zealand. He then tries to educate his guest. “If the customer comes in just says ‘salmon,’ I’m going to ask what kind of salmon would you like? And then I can explain why we have those different salmons, and what is in season, and where it comes from, and why it matters.”

For biologist Tor Naesje, doing that kind of research can help a chef distinguish the good production from the problematic. A senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Tor has been studying Atlantic salmon for around 40 years. He is also the leader of the scientific steering committee that advises Norway’s Ministry of Fishing on its salmon policy and helped devise its so-called ‘traffic light system,’ where production levels are determined by the fish farms’ environmental impacts in each of 13 regions. And although he is fluent in mortality statistics and genetic introgression levels, he also sees plenty of evidence of some producers doing things right—and he emphasizes that the same information is available to consumers.”Most of the farms now put QR codes on their salmon,” he says “So you are able to really trace it from the hatching of the egg to when it is on the table in the restaurant. There are a lot of very good producers, and with the right knowledge, you can find them.”

The codes contain information about the genetic type of eggs, the mortality rates at both the hatchery and in the sea pen, and whether and how frequently the fish have been treated for lice or given antibiotics (you want less, not more). “The number of treatments and medications is a strong indication of welfare,” Tor says.

There are other resources as well. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council evaluates fish farms according to a detailed set of criteria and certifies those that meet its sustainability standards (the Marine Stewardship Council does something similar for wild fisheries). And the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is a helpful guide for making the most sustainable choices–including among fish farms (only three of Norway’s 13 production zones earn the “good alternative” qualification–the remaining 10 are marked ‘avoid.”) “For a regular consumer or even a regular chef who isn’t crazy like I am, it helps to follow someone’s guidance,” says Hajime Sato. “Seafood Watch isn’t perfect but the places on it are 3000% better than the conventional bullshit.”

Others working in the field, however, contend that open pen salmon farming is inherently unsustainable. That, for example, is the message of British environmental organization Wildfish, whose Off The Table campaign has encouraged hundreds of chefs, fishmongers, and restaurants to commit to removing open-pen farmed salmons from their menus.

Chantelle Nicholson, chef of Apricity in London (and MAD Academy 2025 faculty!), is one of them. “I think that the consumption of salmon has got out of control in the UK in particular,” she explains. “And there are all of these great alternatives so it doesn't make sense to be looking at something that is so troublesome.” Instead of salmon, Chantelle serves a version of Rainbow trout called Chalkstream, which is farmed in freshwater pens that are fed with river water but separate from the river itself.

Ragnar Eiriksson, whose seafood restaurant Brút also joined the Off the Table campaign, found a similar solution. As the co-owner of Reykjavik seafood restaurant Brút, he’s had a ringside seat to the salmon debates in Iceland. “Basically they’re making the same mistakes here that they made in Norway twenty or thirty years ago,” he says. “It’s a slow motion train wreck.”

Between the escaped salmon breeding with the wild ones in the rivers, the high levels of pollution from salmon waste and the fact that the companies opening aren’t Icelandic owned and aren’t creating many jobs, it was an easy choice to keep it off the menu. “I mean, it’s a shitty product,” Ragnar says.

But because his restaurant also provides catering for the hotel that houses it, he needed a smoked salmon to serve on the breakfast buffet. With no commercial options for wild salmon, he opted for farmed salmon raised locally in land-based pens, which avoid the problems of lice, pollution, and escaped fish by being entirely enclosed.

Tor Næsje points out that more and more land-based pens (as well as the semi-enclosed sea-based one that supplies Restaurant Iris) are being developed in Norway, so there is hope that, in the not too distant future, open-sea pens will be a thing of the past. Already, Canada plans to phase them out by 2029, and a similar measure–supported by 65% of Icelandic citizens—is currently being debated in the Icelandic parliament.

In which case, Alexandra just might get her wish. “Salmon fishing has been a huge part of our entire lives,” she told the MAD7 audience. “And we only wish to be able to continue guiding for a very very long time, until we can finally pass it down to our future children, just like our fathers did to us.”

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

In July news, we’ve had a blockbuster number of applications to this year’s Academy, and are looking forward to welcoming the first class on September 23rd.

Even MAD needs a little time off, so there will be no MAD Digest next month as we all take a bit of vacation. Until then, happy summer!