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In Praise of Salmon
| Article
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19633 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,056 Words |
| Author
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Adrianne Marcus
Adrianne Marcus has published in Food & Wine, Menus, Travel &
Leisure, Good Food, Cooking Light, and other magazines. |
For years Americans have had this love affair with salmon--the fish, the color, the flavor. When eating out, salmon is decidedly the fish of choice, whether smoked, poached, or grilled. Today, thanks to the advent of salmon farms, fresh salmon is available almost year round. And among those who love salmon in general, many have discovered Norwegian salmon in particular--Norwegian farmed salmon, which is actually Atlantic salmon and has 32 percent more fat than salmon caught in the wild.
In the last few years, salmon farming has begun to take hold in the United States as well. There are salmon farms on the East Coast, in Maine, and on the West Coast, up in Puget Sound. All salmon farms harvest Atlantic salmon because they can grow to their optimum weight within a year and a half.
The majority of salmon farms are where salmon farming began in 1977, however, on the coast of Norway. One group, the Austevoll Fish Industry, the largest fish farming cooperative in Norway, consists of twenty-six companies. It harvests 50,000 tons of salmon a year, 400 tons of which go to the United States.
Having made a serious dent in the salmon population myself, I wanted to go to Austevoll to see the North Sea farms. To get there, one takes a ferry from Krokkeide, a small town south of Bergen and, an hour or consequently later, docks at Huftory. This is the main island in the more than six hundred that make up Austevoll County. About four thousand people inhabit the fishing community. The main processing plant for the salmon is on Huftaroy; the farms are a bit farther offshore.
A mile or so out, on a tiny group of rocks in the middle of the sea, the first of the salmon farms looms into view. It is a gray day, with thick scudding clouds; everything is the color of old pewter, but the trailer in which the fishermen live while working their shifts is white and salmon colored (what else?) and immaculately clean.
Located at the edge of the sea, salmon farms resemble large underwater tennis courts linked together. In these courts, or pens, salmon grow from fingerlings to their full size before being harvested. Most of the facilities are computer operated. The size of the fish, their feeding schedule, and other information on each of the underwater pens are easily obtained by an operator who punches numbers in and gets a readout of that particular pen's statistics,
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