By the end of this year more salmon will be sold than tuna in the UK. I read this in a newspaper, so it must be true.
The article didn’t explain why this should be so. My guess is that it’s for two reasons: salmon tastes better than tuna and salmon is now as cheap because of fish farms. Fish farming off-shore was controversial when it started. Specifically, wild salmon were either picking up diseases when they swam past/under the cages holding the farmed fish or, worst of all, farmed fish were escaping and inter-breeding with wild fish.
Now we can buy smoked salmon and eat salmon fillets cheaply; a luxury food has become affordable. I have not heard any complaints about fish farms for quite a few years. If my grandfather caught a big fish he would send it to be smoked. My mother sometimes asked for a salmon to cook for a party, otherwise, the 50 or so wild salmon that my grandfather caught every year were sold. They were worth real money fifty years ago.
For “fish farming” read “fracking”. Salmon was a luxury food and we don’t want the provision of electricity to become a luxury, do we? Fish farms early on made mistakes; frackers f****d up too. We are in the fortunate position of being able to benefit from the mistakes made by frackers in the US. Our only problem right now is that oil prices are so low as to make it an unattractive investment.
Oil prices, I think, will go up next year and I hope that then we get fracking in the UK. Otherwise we won’t have the power to sear that salmon.