News Coverage
River run draws picky palates
Published July 1, 2004
It's salmon season, and the aficionados are biting.
Fresh wild salmon, a seasonal delicacy coveted in a day when salmon farms produce most of the fillets Americans eat, recently landed in Triangle seafood cases. Their arrival is always anticipated by gourmets who pounce on the season's first Alaskan kings like Kodiak bears.
"It only comes once a year," said Tom Jones of Cary, who bought four fillets Tuesday for his grill. "It's kind of a big deal."
This year, demand for the wild meat is broader than usual, stoked by a blast of marketing and a round of studies suggesting farmed salmon are not as safe to eat. Farmed fish have higher concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial pollutant linked to cancer, the studies found. The results led some watchdogs to recommend wild fish instead.
Salmon farmers dismiss the health claims as so much fish oil. But while they point out that the PCB levels are well within federal safety limits, they acknowledge that the reports, combined with aggressive marketing by the fishing industry in recent years, have driven some consumers to the wild side.
At the Whole Foods Market in Cary, a stream of buyers left the fish counter Tuesday afternoon with deep-pink slabs of wild fish.
"It's better healthwise than the farm-raised, and better tasting," Jackie Henry of Raleigh said as she headed to the cash register with a wild sockeye fillet.
Whole Foods, a chain based in Austin, Texas, with four stores in the Triangle, is promoting the wild fish with zeal. Banners over the front doors announce "Wild Alaskan Salmon is Here!"
Whole Foods hired a pair of Triangle chefs to cook wild salmon and serve samples earlier in the season. Videos playing near the seafood counter continue to tout recipes such as wild salmon with cous-cous.
Without frou-frou, other Triangle grocery stores also bring in wild salmon during the season.
In Alaska, the season opens in May, when the fish migrate from the ocean to their native rivers to spawn. Trawlers move in. The netted fish generally are flown to Seattle where they are processed and then flown or trucked east, suppliers and retailers said.
The wild fish is available fresh in the Triangle through October as salmon make runs up different Alaskan rivers through the fall, retailers said. During the four peak weeks at the start of the season, the wild fish can be expected to outsell the farmed, said Mike Hulsey, retail sales manager for Inland Seafood in Atlanta. A major Southeast supplier, Inland, handles both the wild and farmed fish.
Grocery stores often sell them side by side.
"We sell a lot of the wild in the summer," said Eric Blaesinger, director of community relations for Fresh Market, a Greensboro-based chain that had wild kings from Alaska's Bristol Bay on sale for $9.99 a pound this week.
Mass-market grocery stores also sell wild fish. Some of it is low-end chum salmon sold as "Silverbrite" for about $2 a pound. But at times, the stores also sell the premium species -- coho, sockeye and king.
Lowes Foods expects to have fresh wild sockeye in a couple of weeks, when early-season demand slackens and the chain can get a big order filled. Harris Teeter sold wild Alaskan king salmon in May and June and will carry sockeye the rest of the summer, a spokesman said. Food Lion and Kroger were recently promoting Silverbrite.
Neither retailers nor producers would break down sales figures for wild versus farmed salmon. But salmon of any provenance can't rival mainstays such as beef and chicken. With prices that soar to about $25 a pound for wild Copper River salmon, the fish is a favorite of well-heeled shoppers with educated palates.
The average American eats only 2.02 pounds a year, ranking salmon third behind shrimp and canned tuna, according to the National Fisheries Institute.
But salmon passed fish sticks after the American Heart Association recommended in 2000 that healthy adults eat at least two servings of fish per week, especially fish that contain heart-healthful omega-3 fatty acids.
Salmon isn't the only fatty fish in the sea, but it is the usual choice, said Heather Cox, a dietitian for Kroger.
Consumers gauging the health effects of salmon seem to confront a choice between a heart attack and cancer: A study by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, found seven of 10 farmed salmon tested had PCBs "at levels that raise health concerns."
On average, PCB levels in the farmed salmon were 16 times those in the wild fish. The difference was attributed to the diet of farmed fish. A major study published Jan. 8 in the journal Science also reported higher levels of PCBs in farmed salmon.
The levels are within acceptable limits set by the federal Food & Drug Administration. But the Environmental Working Group said the FDA's limits are out of date and need tightening.
Sales of farmed salmon, most of it from Chile, fell as a result.
"When that scare starts, obviously there is a little dip in sales because retailers are hedging their bets on what's going to happen," said Alex Trent, director of Salmon of the Americas, a New Jersey-based trade group for salmon farmers.
But Trent said farmed salmon sales are still pretty strong. Farmed fish, which he said are the majority of fresh fillets sold, give consumers a way to get fresh salmon during the seven or eight months when wild is not available.
Consumers can get wild salmon all year, too. Without any of the marketing or mystique surrounding the fresh fillets, the fish is sold in vacuum-sealed pouches and cans wrapped in everyday labels such as Bumble Bee.