Looking For A Guilt-Free Filet?

People imagine that wild-caught fish are natural and delicious. It might surprise you to learn that some of the healthiest, tastiest fish actually are grown on land in West Virginia, using a new kind of closed-containment system that could transform the way Americans eat.

Why does this matter? We have to keep looking for a good supply of healthy seafood. Fish have long been a major part of the world’s diet—and pressures on wild fish have steadily increased. Driving this push to harvest the seas is a steady increase in the number of people worldwide and an even sharper increase in our appetite for fish—up 70 percent annually over the past 50 years. Put another way, if we each ate a pound of fish per month before, we now eat almost two. When you count all the world’s hungry mouths, that’s a lot of fish.

In fact, demand is so high that natural sources of fish can’t come close to feeding us all. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations regularly surveys the state of the world’s fisheries and the health of the oceans. In 2007, the group reported that 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks were fully exploited or overexploited—meaning there was no room to increase the number caught.

Meanwhile, aquaculture has been growing faster than any other sector of food production and now supplies more than a third of the world’s fish and shellfish. Aquaculture could supply half of all the fish and shellfish consumed by 2020.

But aquaculture is controversial—no doubt about that. The time has come to chart a new path forward, with cleaner, healthier and less polluting ways to grow fish on land. And that is what we’re doing at our Freshwater Institute.

Because we continuously filter and clean the water in our tanks, our fish are healthy, and we’ve never had to use antibiotics, pesticides or other treatments to keep them that way.

We’ve shown that we can grow healthy trout and perch in our recirculating aquaculture system. Now, we’re growing one of the world’s favorite fish: Atlantic salmon. Our work offers the best viable alternative to open-water farms in decades and protects wild stocks of salmon.

Find out more about how it works here. (PDF Download)

Photo: Salmon filets. Olga Nayashkova / iStockphoto.com (top); Tanks at the Fund's Freshwater Institute. Glynnis McPhee / The Conservation Fund.