Take salmon. Wal-Mart, which buys all its salmon from Chile, sells more than anyone else in the country and undersells all other retailers by at least $2 per pound. That's a lot of market power, which prompts Fishman to ask: "Does it matter that salmon for $4.84 a pound leaves a layer of toxic sludge on the ocean bottoms of the Pacific fjords of southern Chile?"
Salmon in Chile are raised in packed underwater pens — as many as 1 million per farm — and fed prophylactic antibiotics to prevent disease. Here's a fact you'd rather not know: A million salmon produce the same amount of waste as 65,000 people. Combine that waste with unconsumed food and antibiotic residue, and you've got a toxic seabed.
And still more, if you like.
Wal-Mart is deservedly catching the heat here, but in fact such conditions are not limited to the fish farms that supply it. In the US, salmon farms along the Maine coast are severely undermining efforts to recover wild Atlantic salmon populations. I try to avoid eating farm-raised salmon from anywhere.
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