Find the salmon/Craig Medred photo

The knowledge gap

Many in these unUnited States today believe the big problem with American journalism is political bias, and that is a problem.

But the even bigger problem is laziness, ignorance and sometimes the combination of the two.

Consider this:

In Alaska, “love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it.”

Those are the words of award-winning journalist Julia O’Malley reporting for the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) on Gov. Mike Dunleavy penning a social media post suggesting Alaskans should think about modifying the state’s ban on farming fish.

And this is the Anchorage Midtown Walmart just a couple blocks east of the ADN offices on Wednesday:

All farmed; there are no harvests of “wild” Atlantic salmon./Craig Medred photo

Walmart had plenty farmed salmon in its fresh fish space and no Alaska wild salmon. And though there were some wild fish in the freezer compartments, there were a lot of farmed fish there, too.

But apparently no one on the ADN staff had the sense to protect O’Malley from her assumptions as to salmon availability in Alaska and walk over to the nearby Walmart to take a look.

Farm raised, Product of Chile/Craig Medred photo

Farm raised, Product of Denmark/Craig Medred photo

Walmart just happens to be the largest grocery chain in the country. As a result, it tends to stock what Americans want to buy, not what Alaskans want to buy.

Maybe it is trying to tell Alaskans something. Could it be that Alaska has a constantly churning population with a lot of people arriving here every year from “Outside,” as Alaskans call it? Might it be that some of those people, maybe many, are used to eating the kind of fish they have been eating for years?

Restaurants too

As for farmed salmon in Alaska restaurants, Paul Fuhs, the former mayor of the fishing port of Dutch Harbor in far Western Alaska, took to Must Read Alaska to observe that “Ms. O’Malley’s article states that it is rare to find ‘farmed salmon’ in Alaska,  but that is just not true.  Every single sushi restaurant in Alaska is selling farmed product as ‘salmon’ on the menu.”

There is a reason for this. Farmed fish are parasite-free.

As National Public Radio’s Jess Jiang explained a decade ago in a story about how the Norwegians made salmon sushi an everyday meal in Japan, “the (wild and hatchery) salmon people in Japan were used to eating had parasites, so they always cooked it.”

Wild salmon – along with free-range-farmed hatchery salmon from Alaska, Japan and Russia – regularly swallow roundworm eggs when feeding on infected krill or small fish that have been eating infected krill.  The eggs develop into larvae in the salmon and can hatch into worms, which are sometimes found wiggling out of the flesh of wild salmon that have not been frozen long enough or cold enough to kill the parasite.

The worms might be unsightly, but are not considered to be dangerous as long as the fish are thoroughly cooked.  Temperatures above 153 degrees kill the worms, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

In another life as the long-time outdoor editor of the Anchorage Daily News, I had an experience with some young reporters who went dipnetting on the Copper River for the first time, left some of their catch baking under a hot sun, and when later cleaning the fish freaked out at the discovery that they were crawling with worms.

An explanation as to how nematodes that can be almost invisible in the flesh of wild salmon transition into worms that can crawl out of the fish did not seem to calm them much.

Apparently, all those reporters are now gone from the Daily News, leaving no one around to tell O’Malley about why restaurants serving salmon sushi lean toward farmed fish.

Farmed fish, needless to say, do not have the nematode/worm problem because they are fed food free of parasites. It was access to these parasite-free salmon that began to alter the Japanese sushi market in the 1980s.

Because of farmed salmon, sushi went from being almost unheard of in the Asian country to becoming a big seller.  The Tokyo Weekender two years ago reported it reigned “supreme as the nation’s favorite sushi topping” as it had done “for the past 12 years.” 

Fuhs knows this because Fuhs knows fish. Along with being the former mayor of the nation’s largest fishing port, he has long been involved with what there is of an Alaska aquaculture industry. He was the founding president of the Alaska Mariculture Association in the 1980s when the Norwegian industry was taking off and Alaska was considering its aquaculture options.

Misinformation

Sadly, what O’Malley knows about fish could be put in a dusty teacup without disturbing the dust. In 2019, she penned a story for The Nation magazine that declared “Bristol Bay…one of Alaska’s few healthy salmon habitats” and suggested the Bay’s salmon were threatened by “a rapidly changing climate.” 

The story appeared a year after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported the “inshore Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run of 62.3 million fish is the largest on record
dating back to 1893 and….It was the fourth consecutive year that inshore sockeye salmon runs exceeded 50 million fish.”

The 2019 record didn’t stand for long. Two years after O’Malley’s story, the Bay witnessed an even bigger return of 63.2 million.   A year after that came the unprecedented and unimagined return of a record 79.1 million sockeye.

The harvest of 60.3 million sockeye from that 79.1 million return more than doubled the Bay’s 20-year, average annual harvest of 29.4 million sockeye from 2002 to 2021. Returns have moderated somewhat since then, but all harvests have remained above the 20-year-average of 2021, an average already heavily inflated by runs in exceeding 50 million sockeye.

The catch this year was approximately 41 million sockeye from a return of around 50.2 million. This harvest is almost two and a half times greater than the 17.4 million per year average harvest of Bay sockeye from 1956 until the start of the new millennium. 

The truly sad thing here is that O’Malley doesn’t seem to have learned much, if anything, more about Alaska salmon and the Alaska commercial salmon industry since 2019, and that no one at the ADN has told her that maybe it would be a good idea to learn about the subject matter about which you are writing.

At least when the ADN was using Kodiak-based Laine Welch as its “fish reporter,” it had someone who knew fish. There was, of course, another issue in that the ADN wasn’t paying her salary and was billing here as an “independent journalist” while she was being paid by the state’s commercial fishing industry to write what she wrote.

Then ADN editor David Hulen admitted this made him somewhat uncomfortable, but defended his use of Welch as the newspaper’s fish “reporter” by arguing that the state’s fishery issues were too complex for any of his other reporters to follow.

Whether Hulen’s reporting staff was aware of this derogatory rationalization is unknown. But in the short time I worked for Hulen, he never showed any indication that getting things factually correct should be the first requirement for anyone who wrote anything for the newspaper.

Pleasing the publisher

O’Malley’s story for The Nation, it must be recognized, was written to provide what the editors of that magazine wanted. The magazine has not been shy about its view on climate change.

The same year O’Malley wrote about threatened Bay sockeye, The Nation headlined its believe “The Climate Crisis Should Be the World’s Biggest News Story.”

There is no doubt, either, that Bay’s sockeye might someday be threatened by global warming. Salmon are cold-water fish, not tropical fish. And the Bering Sea might one day get too warm for them, but that’s all speculation.

In the here and now, however, scientists agree that warming has only led to a huge increase in sockeye production that has hugely benefited commercial fishermen by partially offsetting the declining value of Alaska salmon in the years since the state banned salmon farming in 1990.

Global salmon prices were then at record highs, and the Alaska salmon fishing industry convinced the state’s political leaders that the best way to keep them there was to ban net-pen salmon farming in the state in favor of the free-range ocean farming business they controlled.

Unfortunately, keeping salmon prices high encouraged a fledgling Norwegian farming industry to continue experimenting with better ways to grow salmon in pens. It didn’t take long for the Norwegians to improve their farming techniques and technology, which encouraged farmers in Chile, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere to get into the salmon business.

The result, as Fuhs noted at Must Read, is that “2.8 million metric tons of farmed salmon (were) produced last year compared to 220,000 tons of salmon produced in Alaska.” He did somewhat overstate the case for the farmers, given that 2022 was an even-numbered year and pink salmon, which make up the bulk of the Alaska salmon harvest, return to the state in far smaller numbers in even-numbered years than in odd-numbered years.

A fairer comparison would have used the state’s five-year average harvest of about 167 million salmon, which translates into roughly 346,000 tonnes or about an eighth of what the farmers produce. But volume isn’t the most important difference between the farmed production of salmon and Alaska’s harvest of wild salmon.

There are two other important factors that must be considered. The first, and most obvious, is that farmed salmon production continues to increase by the year, while Alaska salmon production appears to have now topped out.

The catch this year is destined to go down as the first, odd-year harvest of fewer than 200 million salmon since 2011. And yet the catch remains dominated by pinks – the smallest and least valuable of the Pacific salmon – while the farmers grow the big, fat, slab-sided, high-value Atlantic, coho and Chinook salmon the market demands.

Upscale shoppers

OK, let’s now excuse O’Malley’s misinformation as to farmed salmon being hard to find in Alaska stores and restaurants, and credit these mistakes to a simple lack of knowledge as to parasites in wild salmon and to her being more a Costco shopper than a Walmart shopper.

Over the years, Anchorage Costco stores have taken some heat from uppity Alaskans for selling farmed salmon, not to mention trawl-caught Alaska fish, and no farmed salmon could be found in the Debarr Road Costco Thursday, although the Costco website still promised farmed salmon.

But never mind the lack of fresh, farmed salmon there, you’d think that if reporter O’Malley was a Costco shopper, she might have noticed a couple of telling things about Alaska’s commercial salmon fisheries while wandering around the warehouse. This would be the first:

Find the salmon/Craig Medred photo

Look at what you see in that photo. Pallets and pallets and pallets of canned tuna, a pallet of sardines, and a narrow little stack of salmon in cans, which is where a whole lot of Alaska salmon are destined to end up.

Why?

Because a whole lot of Alaska salmon are so small that there’s not much that processors can do with them but put them in cans or pouches. The five-year average weight for the Alaska pink salmon that comprise the bulk of annual harvests is 3.24 pounds, but pinks came back small at an average of 3.1 pounds last year and look to be even smaller this year.

The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC), which has been hauling in millions of pounds of what Alaskans call “humpies” from in front of its hatcheries, has not reported a catch with an average weight over 3 pounds and has reported numerous hauls with average weights as low as 2.6 pounds this year.

Salmon so small cannot be carved into the filets the market wants. So they go into cans or pouches or are ground up into fish meal to be used for pet food, fertilizer or animal feed. Pet food might be the most valuable product on that list, given that salmon canned for pets and selling for 36 cents per ounce is more expensive than salmon canned for people and selling for 26.3 cents per ounce.

Alaska’s bounty of pinks has put it in what is now an annual battle with Russia to win the title of world leader in low-value salmon. To date, 60 percent of this year’s Alaska harvest has been humpies. According to state data, those fish were worth just under 71 cents each to the commercial fishermen who caught them last year.

This compares to a 2024 sockeye value of just shy of $5 per fish, according to state data. Pinks carry such a low value because the market demand for canned salmon is low. And the aisle pictured above is a graphic illustration of what Costco, a business that earns its profits by selling high volumes of products at the lowest possible prices, thinks about the consumer demand for canned salmon.

There is something else an alert reporter might also have noticed at Costco.

Farmed good, not bad/Craig Medred photo

Shrimp are America’s favorite seafood. Americans, on average, eat about 70 percent more shrimp than they eat salmon, according to the National Fisheries Institute, and Costco appears to believes that billing these fish as “farm raised” makes them more attractive to potential buyers.

This is nothing more or less than a reflection of where markets are today. This is 2025, not 1935. Billing something as “wild” is not necessarily a marketing plus in the Age of the Internet.

Rob DeLucia, the owner of an Anchorage restaurant who told O’Malley that farmed salmon is inferior in taste and texture to wild fish, might believe that (and the author would certainly agree with DeLucia’s opinion), but taste is an individual thing.

“Generally, farmed salmon is milder, while wild salmon, depending on the type of wild salmon, has a fuller flavor” is how the Food Network describes the difference between wild and farmed fish. 

“Fuller flavor” can mean “better” to one diner and “gamey” or “fishy” to another. An Outside-based report who covers Alaska commercial fisheries once confessed to me his family wouldn’t eat anything preceded by the word “wild.”

“In taste tests between farmed and wild salmon,” the University of California has reported, “sometimes farmed salmon is preferred. Sometimes taste panels prefer wild fish. However, these taste tests often compare farmed and wild salmon of different species and are not really designed to tell the differences between the tastes of the farmed and wild versions of the same type of salmon.”

I’ve personally met plenty of people who said they don’t like wild salmon because the flavor is too “strong.” My personal view is that this is all in their heads, and that if you told them the wild salmon they were eating was farmed, they might well end up saying it was the best salmon they’d ever tasted.

But I have never conducted a blind taste test to see if any of them can actually tell the difference between a wild salmon and one that has been farmed. On the other hand, I have returned from salmon fishing trips, invited friends over for salmon dinners, served them salmon that had been in the freezer for a year, and listened to them rave about how much better “fresh” salmon tastes, given their assumption they were eating freshly caught fish.

(Editor’s note: I am not a fan of freshly caught salmon because of a preference for salmon barely cooked in the middle, and there is that parasite problem best solved by a nice long stay in a very cold freezer.)

When it comes to markets, the preconceived notions of consumers, along with price, matter.  And we are now in a world where some people will avoid wild salmon because it is wild, and others will avoid farmed salmon because it is farmed.

Which of these salmon Alaskans think tastier is irrelevant because Alaska is a tiny, tiny market.  Based solely on gross population numbers, the 740,000 hearty souls now reported to be living in the 49th state represent but 0.2 percent of U.S. consumers.

As a result – with salmon as with oil and the Alaska natural gas no one wants at this time because of the high costs of moving it to market – Alaska is at the mercy of national and global markets.

Farming salmon or any other fish in Alaska might make no economic sense. The costs of production might prove so high that there is no way for Alaska fish to compete with farmed salmon from Norway, Canada, Chile or elsewhere. But Dunleavy is right in suggesting that there are questions that should be asked about this in a state where the commercial salmon industry has become more and more an economic non-entity.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis in 2024 credited Alaska “agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting” with a $460 million contribution to the state’s roughly $70 billion “all industry” gross domestic product (GDP). That put those industries combined just behind “arts, entertainment, and recreation” at close to $477 million.

Last year was not a good one for Alaska salmon, however, so the numbers are sure to be better this year. But the lion’s share of Alaska’s GPD in 2024 came from where it has been coming from for years: various government entities, the natural resource extraction industries, ie. oil, gas and mining; and everything else.

This is what Alaska economist Scott Goldsmith long ago dubbed the three-legged stool of the Alaska economy: oil and gas, federal spending and everything else. Commercial fishermen Kate Troll is now worried the government leg of that stool, which helps to fund the purchase of a lot of the Alaska pink salmon the market doesn’t want, is threatened by President Donald Trump’s budget cuts.

She in March turned to the Alaska Beacon to claim federal spending cuts could take a chainsaw to the government leg of the stool and warn the “majority of Alaskans who voted for Donald Trump” against “the distant lure of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil or the liquefied natural gas pipeline project blindsid(ing) you from seeing how Alaska’s economy is being seriously threatened by the Trump administration.”

Her fears underlined why it might be a good time for the state to follow Dunleavy’s lead and at least ask some of the key questions that need to be asked about Alaska seafood production. To wit:

Is there a market for farmed fish from Alaska, be they increasingly popular trout, the turbot, halibutand olive flounder now being farmed elsewhere, or God-forbid salmon? Could any of these fish be produced in Alaska at prices that would make them competitive and profitable in the market? Is there any sort of synergy to be found between fish farms and what is now Alaska salmon waste that could be converted into cheap feed for other fish? Could the permitting of self-contained, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) open the door for an aquaponics business such as Wisconsin’s Superior Fresh to provide Alaskans with organic leafy greens year-round and fresh fish in the winter?

The answers to all those questions might be no. I’ll admit my gut feeling is that the answer is no.

But these questions should have been asked years ago. They haven’t been because Alaskans have allowed the state’s commercial fishing industry – which like all businesses is focused on its own self-interest rather than the public good (as it should be) – to dictate fishery policy for decades, in part thanks to journalists like O’Malley sho appear happy to be led around by the nose.

And that’s the worst problem with journalism today.