Choosing Healthy Seafood

I was recently preparing some salmon for myself, and I couldn’t remember if it was healthy or not to eat the salmon skin. I left the skin on the fish and sat down at the computer as I began to eat. I was poking around the internet looking for an answer and few clicks later I ended up at this Seafood Guide sponsored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The website is pretty simple to understand. You get a list of seafood types in the left column. You choose a type of seafood and then a page loads that shows you the different market names for that seafood, and tells you what the different market names reflect. Up to this point it hadn’t occurred to me that there would be different names for the same seafood, so I quickly navigated to salmon to get some more information about what I was eating.

I arrived at the salmon information page and found 3 categories of salmon: “Best”, “Good” and “Avoid”. Within each of the categories there are several market names. I went to the kitchen and retrieved the label from my salmon, only to find that it said “Farmed Salmon – Dye Added” in big bold letters. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I just assumed that since I was getting freshly packed salmon, it would be something that was good for me. I couldn’t have been more off base.

Apparently farmed salmon isn’t very healthy, as it falls into the “Avoid” category. When salmon is raised in captivity it will often lose or not develop the natural pink color, so they inject or soak the meat in red dye to color it, so that humans find it more appetizing. That is, they find it more appetizing until they realize what it is that they are eating.

Needless to say, I couldn’t finish my meal at this point. I disposed of the remaining salmon and continued to read through the Seafood Guide. There’s a lot of important and interesting information in there. The site centers around what kind of seafood is healthy, and what kind of seafood is environmentally friendly. I hope the Monterey Bay Aquarium site can help you before you buy unhealthy fish.

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