home :: wild salmon

Tame the Wild Salmon for Your Table

Those with a taste for wild salmon, should first investigate whether that lovely fillet your fishmonger is flaunting, may actually be a fake. The truth is, that despite the steady supply of fish laid out on ice at the market, very few of them are genuine wild salmon.

The Federal government has declared that wild salmon are an "endangered species", a move that is confusing to consumers who see salmon at the grocer's all the time. This is not because there are lots of wild salmon available, but because of the rise in production of hatchery and farmed salmon. Guidelines currently prohibit the "taking" of wild salmon, until stocks have replenished themselves.

Habitat loss for the wild salmon has crept northward from California, and is now stretching across the North Pacific to Korea, Japan, and Russian waters. Over-fishing has helped deplete the stocks to the point where wild salmon is considered "endangered", which means their survival is in doubt.

Restaurant patrons are often bewildered by the choice in this most delicious of fish. There is farmed salmon, troll-caught salmon, hatchery salmon, and Atlantic salmon, which is actually salmon raised on farms on the west coast of Canada, where the coastline runs into the Pacific Ocean. The chances of finding a genuine wild salmon on the menu, is almost nil.

It's possible though, to get a troll-caught Alaska Chinook Salmon, which qualifies as a wild salmon, although not from the same stock that is now endangered further to the South. In Oregon and Washington states you may also find wild Steelhead salmon on the menu, caught by certain Native American tribes, who are the only ones permitted to market the fish. Other fishers must release them when caught.

If you're looking for a nice fillet of wild salmon, you might as well bypass the ones marked "fresh Atlantic salmon". There are virtually no legal commercial fisheries on the Atlantic ocean.