Adult black soldier fly.blacksoldierflyblog.comBlack soldier fly larvae are all the rage in composting, and the star performer in a new kind of "ultimate vermicomposting" system. These critters will devour anything biological that you can throw at them, including items that normally cannot be composted and instead end up in the trash, so called 'putrescent' wastes like meat scraps and dairy. And what you wind up with is big fat delicious grubs, perfect food for chickens or fish in a charming and tasty backyard closed loop system. And on a larger scale, their culture could help towns and cities deal with the mountains of putrescents that now go to landfills.

So I interviewed a man known for dabbling with the fly, Scott Kellogg, who is co-author of the book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-Ourselves Guide and the primary teacher of R.U.S.T. -- The Radical Urban Sustainability Training, an intensive weekend workshop in urban ecological survival skills. Currently, Scott is developing a new organization in Albany, N.Y. the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center. It is planned to be a demonstration of environmental technologies and sustainable micro industries applicable in today's urban environment, like black soldier fly (BSF) systems.

Scott, what is a black soldier fly?

A black soldier fly (Hermetia Illucens) is an insect species found commonly throughout the U.S. As an adult, it neither bites nor stings nor eats, and in fact does not even have a mouth. For this reason, it has no interest in food, and therefore does not enter human occupied buildings or spread disease like a common housefly.

What about them excites you?

The grub-like juvenile larvae of the black soldier fly have the capability to quickly devour many types of food wastes, including putrescent meat and dairy products, which are difficult to process in regular composting or through a worm composting system. The finished product can be used as a soil amendment.

To date this is more of a backyard pursuit, right? Where can the backyard composter learn more, online?

There is growing interest about black soldier fly composting on the web. www.blacksoldierflyblog.com is a great resource of people sharing their experiences with BSF. Additionally, we discuss BSF culture methods in our book, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living.

What's the potential in composting putrescent wastes with them? What kind of materials are these?

For some composters, black soldier larvae have a peel.blacksoldierlfyblog.comThere's a lot of potential. Food waste items such as meat scraps and dairy products often pose a problem in standard composting, as they are difficult to break down, and commonly produce smells and attract flies if they are not processed quickly enough. For this reason, the management of putrescent wastes is a big hole in community composting operations. BSF can devour such wastes at such a rate that rotting smells will not be produced, and the pheromones put out by BSF larvae repel house flies.

What do you do with the pupae?

They can be used as a high protein feed for fish or chickens, and therefore can be critical components in a closed loop ecosystem. Additionally, there has been research done about the possibility of using BSF larvae as a fuel stock for biofuels -- they are around 50 percent lipids in content. We may soon see people driving maggotmobiles.

Is pupae just a nice way to say 'maggots?'

Yes. So is grub, larvae, "phonenix worm" or any of the other euphemisms. What's important to remember is that they're not house fly "maggots," and will not spread disease. Admittedly, I was a little turned off the first time I saw BSF larvae in a compost pile, but after getting to know about how beneficial these insects are, I've grown to appreciate them.

The term 'manure management' doesn't help the 'ick' factor perhaps. But what's the potential there?

Again, huge. BSF can rapidly reduce the volume of any manure pile, and greatly reduce the risk of disease transmission from house flies.

Can you imagine BSF being used for other 'putrescents?'

Sure. Dead animals, sewage, milkshakes. The sky's the limit.

What kinds of regulatory or structural hurdles might have to be overcome at the municipal level for larger scale efforts?

Probably no more than those in place for a standard composting/vermicomposting operation. Such systems are so new, it's likely that regulations don't even exist for them.

Ever used them for bait?

No, but they're sold online from a number of places as a fishing bait under the name "phoenix worms."

Entomophagy isn't everyone's thing, but if one wanted to get BSF on the national map, how about inviting TV food adventurer Anthony Bourdain to snack on some in a red wine reduction? Or there could be a BSF eating contest between him and Andrew Zimmern. Discuss.

Most culinary traditions in the world aside from Western have some practice of entomophagy. Cooked BSF larvae could certainly be part of one. Because most people aren't ready for that, using them indirectly to create palatable eggs and fish will be more likely to go over.

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Learn more about the black soldier fly and order your very own BSF composting kit at http://blacksoldierflyblog.com

And check how fast the larvae take down this pile of cukes (there are a zillion other videos on YouTube, too):

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots

This Halloween, cut flesh for the climate

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night.

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What's up, cat?Dear Lou,
My wife and I enjoy fish and like to eat a variety of types of fish. Living in Minnesota we have access to locally caught walleye but have to be careful not to eat too much because of mercury content in MN lakes. I've been a big fan of catfish (bottom feeders) and am curious as to the pros and cons of farm-raised catfish. Are we talking similar issues with farm-raised catfish as Tom Philpott's recent essay  re: farm-raised salmon?

We'd like to know more!

Dear Glenn,
Dang! I hear walleye are delicious. According to Minnesota's fish advisory you can eat one walleye meal a week, but if your wife is pregnant she's out of luck. On the upside, local crappie is less restricted, but, wow, talk about the need for a serious re-naming campaign.

I'm also a big fan of catfish, especially in light of some research. But-and this is a big but-you have to be savvy before you reach for that Po' Boy.

So let's get to the pros and cons, bad news first:

Cons:
Most of the catfish eaten in the United States is imported, and unless you specifically ask for "U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish," or see the official seal, you might be getting Asian-farmed catfish. FYI on the name game: Vietnamese pangasius (tra or basa), is a different species of catfish than the kind grown here (channel catfish), and cannot be called catfish in the American market. Because the Chinese now farm the same variety of catfish as we do, it will be labeled catfish. So, look for "Product of China" on fish labels--and avoid it! This is potentially very bad stuff. Beware also of any white fish that cannot be linked to a source. Beware of the generic term "fish."

• Many of the problems with farmed salmon identified in Tom's post apply to catfish farmed in Asia. Catfish from there is often contaminated with carcinogens such as malachite green, illegal antibiotics or salmonella In Alabama, state scientists have found banned antibiotics in catfish from China. The FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of foreign-farmed fish. It has been notoriously lax at doing so. (Luckily, American catfish are sustainably farmed. I'll get to that soon.)

• According to the catfish wiki, catfish can't be kosher because the fish lack scales. This would pose a problem for observant Jews.

• The high-protein feed (made from soy, corn and rice) that farmed catfish eat is not organic.

• Some people find the taste boring, occasionally muddy, or think catfish is merely a vehicle for batter and hot sauce.

• Because farm-raised catfish eat vegetarian feed, they are not as high in Omega-3 fatty acids as cold-water fatty fish, such as sardines.

• All-American catfish may not be easy to find. As many as one-third of U.S. catfish farmers recently went out of business because of the high cost of soy and corn. This may one reason that two of my favorite markets didn't carry catfish at all. It could also be a perceived stigma: Many diners turn their nose up at lowly bottom feeders, and catfish has the reputation for being the poor man's fish. One of my friends who is a fishmonger at a high-end grocery explained, "People here just don't want it. It has pretty much been replaced by tilapia."

Pros:
Other folks praise its flavor as mild or even sweet. I recently broiled some U.S. farm-raised fillets with a little butter and served them with a simple squeeze of lime. They were terrific and so mild that my friend Kim described them chicken-like. "So un-fishy," she said with disbelief. "My kids would eat this."

• At Price Chopper I paid $5.99 per pound for the aforementioned fillets; farmed salmon was $9.99 per pound. Evidently pesticides, sea lice and antibiotics cost extra.

• Safety standards for U.S.-grown catfish are high and catfish farmers are pushing for ever more rigorous regulation. By contrast, there are currently no international safety standards for fish, hence the nasty stuff sometimes found in Asian imports. And few imports are inspected. (See my admonition above to read the label!)

• It's American, goddamnit. (I'm in a protectionist mood these days.) In addition to racking up fewer food miles, eating this native fish keeps American farmers in business.

• Unlike farmed salmon, catfish farmed here are freshwater fish and therefore raised in self-contained inland ponds, which means they are not very likely to escape into the sea and overtake other fish populations. These self contained pens also pose little risk to the surrounding environment (unlike open-ocean pens used for salmon). This is why green groups such as the National Audubon Society, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Environmental Defense endorse U.S. catfish as a safe environmental choice.

• Unlike salmon, catfish are vegetarians and fed vegetarian feed, as opposed to the wild-caught fish that salmon are fed.

• You can eat it every day! Because American catfish are not raised in coastal environments and kept in clean aerated pens that use well water and fed vegetarian feed they are very low in contaminants such as mercury. (Vietnamese catfish on the other hand are farmed using river water that may contain all manner of pollutants, including human excrement.) Antibiotics are seldom issued to US Farm-Raised catfish and hormones are never used.

• Eating bottom feeders is cool. Eating lower on the food chain gives our depleted fish stocks a chance to recover and reduces our chances of ingesting heavy metals and poisons often found in many predatory fish. It's also worth noting that stigmas can be reversed: At one point in our nation's history lobster was considered too déclassé to eat; people fed it to pigs (man, can you imagine how awesome that bacon must have tasted?). U.S. farm-raised premium catfish fillets (which are thicker) may get an anti-stigma boost through a new name: Look for it in 2010 as "Delacata." (Hey, it worked for Orange Roughy, which used to be Slime Head. Take notes, crappie!)

Bottom line: Pass the hot sauce and enjoy U.S. farm-raised catfish whenever you can get it. If you can't find it, ask your fishmonger or grocery store to order it. Because you mentioned that you like to eat a variety of fish, here's two of my favorite tools that make choosing sustainable and healthy seafood easier: A seafood watch list that can be tucked into your wallet or downloaded to your cell phone and an online mercury calculator.

Your devoted food columnist and lover of all things with gills,

Lou

Related Links:

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Down on the farm: most salmon consumed in the U.S. comes from industrial aquaculture. Ninety percent of the salmon consumed in the United States comes from factory-style farms--most of it imported. Until very recently, our biggest supplier was Chile--whose salmon industry is in a state of collapse, ravaged by a virus called "infectious salmon anemia."

Like U.S. factory meat farms, Chile's salmon cages veritably runneth over with antibiotics. Earlier this year, the Pew Environmental Group obtained some damning FDA documents about the Chilean salmon industry. The documents revealed that:

Three Chilean salmon farming companies, including the two largest producers of farmed salmon, used a number of drugs not approved by the U.S. government.  These chemicals include the antibiotics flumequine and oxolinic acid and the pesticide emamectin benzoate. The documents further show that the farmed salmon containing  residues of unapproved chemicals were destined for the U.S. market.

These operations are located in Chile, but Norwegian agribusiness giants largely control the trade. "The three largest producers in Chile have been Marine Harvest/Norway; Cermaq/Norway; and Aquachile/Chile," Pew's Andrea Kavanagh informs me. "These three represent more than 50% market share."

Now Pew has obtained more information on the nature of the Chilean salmon industry. Note how Norwegian players are using much more in the way of harsh chemicals in their Chilean operations than they are in their domestic ones. I'll be covering the salmon story more in the weeks to come; for now, here's an excerpt from an email I received from Pew today:

Oceana Chile, a partner organization in the Pure Salmon Campaign, recently obtained data from the Chilean Ministry of Economy confirming excessive use of antibiotics in Chilean farmed salmon. According to the Minister's report, Chile used 385,635 kg of antibiotics in 2007 while Norway only used 649 kg. This means that Chile used almost 600 times more antibiotics than the larger Norwegian industry. Chile in 2008 used 325,616 kg of antibiotics.

According to the data received by Oceana, there have been documented uses of at least four antibiotics not included on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Approved Drugs list during the past two years. The Chilean records state that, in 2008 alone, the drugs Oxolinic Acid (25,325.26 kg), Amoxicillin (348.93 kg), Erythromycin (7,980.82 kg) and Flumequine (32,293.36 kg) were used to treat fish produced in Aquaculture facilities. Drugs that are not included on the U.S. FDA's Approved Drugs list are not permitted to be imported to or sold in the U.S. market.

These staggering figures raise even more questions about the sustainability of the Chilean farmed salmon industry.

The non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in fish destined for food production raises concerns about possible antibiotic resistant bacterial infections in humans. Until the Chilean industry collapsed from disease outbreaks in 2008, Chile was the largest source of farmed salmon for American consumers.

Previously, evidence of banned chemicals in Chilean farmed salmon was limited to individual cases and assertions by scientists. The new data from the Chilean Ministry of Economy provide the first official industry-wide figures confirming extensive use of specific antibiotics, including quinolones, which are prohibited by U.S. law. 

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A Colorado company recalled the equivalent of 1.86 million Quarter Pounders. In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages of the meat and livestock industries.

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Sometimes I think I write a little too much about the meat industry. But the news it generates is so consistently grave, and so generally underreported, that I can't resist. Moreover, outbreaks of E. coli and MRSA  are really ecological markers--feedback that our way of producing meat is deeply unsustainable and really quite dangerous. We ignore these news flashes from our ecoystem at our peril. So I scribble on.

Here's the latest: In Colorado, 14 people have fallen ill from hamburger meat tainted with antibiotic-resistent salmonella, the Boulder newspaper Daily Camera reports. (Note that antibiotic-resistent salmonella is distinct from MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, increasingly associated with industrial meat production, that kills 20,000 Americans each year--more than AIDS.)

The bad burger came from a Denver-based supermarket chain called King Soopers, which has now recalled 466,236 pounds of it.

It's Meat Wagon tradition to convert such abstract-seeming figures into what we like to call Quarter Pounder Equivalents. According to our proprietary computer models, King Soopers has officially released enough suspect beef for McDonald's to crank out approximately 1.86 million Quarter Pounders.

In addition to Colorado, the tainted meat has been distributed to retail outlets in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. That's our food system--concentrating pathogens and sending them far and wide.

Again, a gaping whole has been exposed in our food-safety system. The USDA's FSIS, which oversees meat safety, announced the recall on July 22; according to the Daily Camera, people in Colorado "became ill between June 13 and 28 after buying their meat between June 1 and 14." So it took more than a month to recall 1.86 million Quarter Pounder Equivalents after people came down with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. What's the rush, guys?

Of course, the meat actually entered the food system as far back as May 23. Nice work, inspectors!

But the underlying issue is the meat industry's reliance on antibiotics to keep animals alive while in cramped, flithy conditions and on questionable diets. As Michael Pollan reported in his classic 2002 article "Power Steer," antibiotics are a routine fact of cow life on feedlots. In fact, if you're going to feed corn and corn byproducts to ruminants that evolved to eat grass, antibiotics are necessary. Describing a visit to a large feedlot in Kansas, Pollan wrote:

First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 [the calf Pollan had bought] will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive process--its rumen, in particular --that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics.

Pollan goes on to report that:

In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin, another antibiotic.

Yum! Nor is intentionally spiking feed rations with Rumensin and tylosin the only way beef cows are exposed to antibiotics. Sometimes they're inadvertently present in the feed itself. Amid the biofuel boom of recent years, feedlot operators have been putting drastically more distillers grains--a byproduct of corn-based ethanol--into cattle rations. As I've reported before, most ethanol makers routinely use antibiotics in production process--and the FDA recently found significant antibiotic residues in distillers grains. FDA researchers detected penicillin, virginiamycin, erythromycin, and tylosin. Tylosin is one of the two identified by Pollan as common feedlot fodder.

But wait, it gets worse. Antibiotic resistance has already reared its head at ethanol plants. In a recent article, the Associated Press quotes a University of Minnesota researcher who says he found resistant bacteria in distillers grains "when he sampled bacteria at four Midwest ethanol plants several years ago." So the FDA itself has found antibiotic residues in distillers grains, and independent researchers have found resistant bacterial strains in the stuff. What have regulators done to keep distillers grains out of feedlots? Bugger-all, as the British say.

(The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recently put out an excellent short primer (PDF) on the issue of antibiotics and distillers grains; and the blog Food Poison Journal has a nice backgrounder on the recent history of antibiotic-resistant salmonella.)

Anyone for a House bill that would ban routine use of antibiotics in animal farms? "The farm [read: agribusiness] lobby's opposition makes its [the bill's] passage unlikely," The New York Times reported recently. Too bad it's that simple.

Side of PBDE with that salmonella burger?
One thing you feel safe about when considering a typical U.S. burger patty, chicken breast, or pork chop: It's not likely to burst into flames on the skillet and burn your house down.

Okay, that's probably not the most appropriate lead-in to the next stop on the Meat Wagon, but it's Friday. Get this, from Environmental Health News:

People who eat meat and poultry have significantly higher levels of common flame retardants compared to vegetarians.

Ouch. The topic here is a study (abstract) by Boston University researchers measuring levels of PBDEs, once a commonly used flame retardant, in the bodies of meat eaters and vegetarians.

Guess which side won? "Vegetarians had 23-27 percent less PBDEs circulating in their serum as compared to meat-eaters," reports EHN. Chicken seemed to be the main culprit.

Serum levels of 5 different PBDEs were associated with eating poultry. People who more poultry had higher levels of the PBDEs. Poultry fat was the greatest contributor to the body burden of PBDEs.

But red meat fared poorly, too. "Red meat intake was associated with two of the measured PBDE levels," EHN reports. Consumption of fish and dairy, however, showed no effect.

In terms of demographics, levels of PBDEs skewed in the following order: "males, the youngest age group examined (12-19 yrs old), the poor, and the underweight (subjects with lowest BMI)."

This is pretty devastating news for a nation that consumes more than a half pound of meat per day per capita. What are the health implications? EHN:

PBDEs accumulate in the liver, kidney and thyroid gland and are known endocrine disruptors. Chronic exposure and elevated levels lead to disruption of estrogen and thyroid systems. Animal and epidemiological studies link PBDE exposure to several types of reproductive and nervous system impairments.

And here's how Environmental Working Group describes the situation:

A growing body of research in laboratory animals has linked PBDE exposure to an array of adverse health effects including thyroid hormone disruption, permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioral changes, hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, fetal malformations and, possibly, cancer. Research in animals shows that exposure to brominated fire retardants in-utero or during infancy leads to more significant harm than exposure during adulthood, and at much lower levels.

So how are flame retardants, of all things, making their way into the meat supply? That remains a mystery. From a Science Daily report on the study:

Although it is not known how flame retardants get into commercial animal products, possibilities include the contamination of animal feed, contamination during processing or packaging and general contamination of the environment. PBDEs accumulate in fat tissue and resist degradation in the environment.

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An endangered chum salmon attempts to jump a small dam on the Deschutes River in Washington. While researching my post on Cheesecake Factory, I came upon contradictory information on how many pounds of wild fish it takes to create a pound of farmed salmon.

Industry sources like this one paint a (relatively)  rosy picture: "Every pound of salmon requires one-and-a-half pounds of fishmeal, a ratio far more efficient than other farmed animals." That's a much better feed conversion ratio than you get from beef (10 pounds of feed yield one pound of beef) or pork (5:1).

But then you get sources like Dan Imhoff, who refers to the "approximately three pounds of wild fish needed to produce each pound of farmed salmon."

What gives? I turned to Taras Grescoe, author of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, which I consider the most important book on food politics since Omnivore's Dilemma. I remembered from reading the book that Grescoe had debunked the industry claim, but couldn't remember precisely how or find my copy. So I emailed him to ask. Here's what he wrote:

The salmon farming industry deliberately tries to mislead people with this feed conversion stuff; I find it maddening. The salient figure is not how much feed gets turned into salmon flesh (and the industry has indeed gotten better at that-a lot of the feed used to just fall to the bottom of the ocean. Now they've installed underwater cameras, so they can see when the fish have stopped snapping up the feed.) The salient figure is how many pounds of smaller ocean fish (which are converted into feed) it takes to make a pound of salmon flesh.

In other words, the industry is getting up to some chicanery here. They're comparing apples (pounds of feed) to oranges (pounds of fish). So what happens when you compare pounds of wild fish that gets turned into feed, to pounds of resulting farmed fish? Here's Grescoe in his email:

The analysts I talked to put the ratio at closer to 3.9 to 1. That's almost 4 pounds of smaller fish (anchoveta from Peru, for example, or herring, as well as krill, which is truly a disastrous thing to remove from the food chain-see my book on that one) to make one pound of salmon.

That's just scandalous. Anchovies are a glorious food--delicious as a flavor builder in canned form, fantastic grilled when fresh. They're a nutritional powerhouse, they don't accumulate much mercury, and their stocks replenish rapidly. We'd make ourselves very happy by eating more of them--so why are we grinding them into meal, pelletizing them along with some truly dodgy ingredients (see below), and feeding them to miserable confined salmon?

But really, it gets worse. After writing the Cheescake Factory post, I found my copy of Bottomfeeder. In his email, Grescoe suggested I look up his section on krill, which he describes like this:

These small, translucent, shrimp-like invertebrates are a keystone species in the oceans of the world, filtering the minute phytoplankton that other species are unable to process and sequestering atmospheric carbon through their feces, which sinks to the sea floor.

Moreover, "everything in the ocean from anchovetas and penguins to blue whales" feed on krill.

Sounds like a species worth keeping around. Even without the fishmeal industry, krill are under pressure--in Antarctic waters, populations have plunged "as global warning decreases the sea ice coverage that provides habitat for the plankton the krill need to survive." That's a feedback spiral--krills sequester carbon, and as climate change erodes their population, less carbon gets sequestered, triggering more climate change.

But that has not stopped the salmon-feed industry. According to Grescoe, two European companies--EWOS and Skretting--control 80 percent of the salmon-feed market. And their  pellets "are coated in krill to make them palatable to farmed fish." Grescoe reports that "enormous vessels from six different countries are vacuuming up krill" to satisfy demand. Krill fishing has been banned on the U.S. west coast, but the salmon farms that supply us still consume the stuff en masse.

The book also reveals some real gross-out stuff about salmon feed. Writes Grescoe:

In the wild, salmon are top-of-the-food-chain predators, subsisting, at various times in their lifecycle, on plankton, krill, squid, and smaller fish. Industrial aquaculture, however, has turned them into consumers of some of the nastier byproducts of land animals.

That means that as with the rations of of feedlot cows, salmon feed contains poultry meal--"an industrial product made of intestines, undeveloped eggs, spray-dried blood, necks, and feet of poultry." An that's not all: "chicken manure--a potentially rich source of tape worms, salmonella, and arsenic--is also a key ingredient of salmon feed."

So we're feeding not just chicken parts but also chickenshit to salmon.

Grescoe also notes that, in response to criticisms of depleting wild fish stocks to feed farmed fish, companies are substituting some vegetable oil (mainly from genetically modified rapeseed) for fish oil. But that's not great, either. Rising demand for veggie oil puts pressure on ecologically fragile land, including tropical rainforests that sponge carbon. Moreover, subbing veggie oil for fish oil reduces the amount of omega 3 fatty acids in the the resulting farmed fish, Grescoe reports. Of course, the industry markets farmed salmon as an excellent source of omega-3s.

Of course, the answer to these dilemmas isn't for restaurants like Cheesecake Factory to switch their menus to wild-caught salmon year round. The answer is to think of salmon as a delicacy--to be enjoyed fresh when it's in season in places like the northwest, and as a treat in preserved form elsewhere. Rather than menu subsitutions, we need to be moving toward what Wendell Berry has called the "universal necessity of local adaptation." Every area, every season has its culinary delights and nutritional powerhouses. We need to reacquaint ourselves with them. 

At any rate, anyone interested in understanding the full weight of the trouble facing the oceans--and the full depravity of industrial aquaculture--must read Grescoe's book.

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What’s the dish on farm-raised catfish?

Chilean salmon industry plunges into an abyss of pesticides and antibiotics

Down on the farm: most salmon consumed in the U.S. comes from aquacultureIn a post on his group blog, the Internet Food Association, Washington Post blogger and food-politics columnist Ezra Klein poses the philosophical question, "Is the Cheesecake Factory Gross?"

The context is a bet involving the highly regarded cookbook writer Michael Ruhlman, who recently chided another writer for praising a dish offered by the Cheesecake Factory called "miso salmon." (By the way, when did cheesecake factories start churning out fish dishes? Are salmon farms going to start whipping up cheesecakes?)

Accepting a challenge from the Cheesecake Factory-loving writer, Ruhlman sampled said miso salmon--and reluctantly admitted to finding it "delicious." He also praised something called "crispy beef," and found the restaurant's "chicken piccata" and "pasta carbonara" solid but uninspired. Ruhlman's conclusion: The Cheesecake Factory is depressingly mid-brow, but it doesn't suck after all.

For Klein, Ruhlman's judgment settles the debate around whether Cheesecake Factory is gross. Klein continues with a nice discussion of how gigantic companies have the resources to make food taste good, and then fixates on the alarmingly high caloric content of the chain's wares.

All of this is well and good--but it doesn't really get to the heart of whether or not the Cheesecake Factory is gross. "The food is enjoyable," Klein declares. "The value is incredible." Now if only the company would cut down on portion size/calories, it would be great. Right?

No. To gauge the Cheesecake Factory's grossness or lack thereof, you have to go beyond the assessment of a celebrated gourmand or calorie counts. Here's my question: What sort of ingredients is the company using?

The company's menu fills pages like a 19th century Russian novelist. It contains this "promise":

We use all-natural chicken, humanely raised without the use of antibiotics or unnecessary chemicals, premium beef that is Certified Angus, U.S.D.A. Kobe or Choice, fresh fish that is either Longline or Hook & Line caught whenever possible, cooking oils that contain no trans fats, and much of our produce is sourced direct from premium growers.

That's more than you get from lots of restaurant chains, but really says nothing about whether the meat and fish it serves is factory-farmed. Let's go back to that miso salmon. The menu describes it thusly: "Fresh Salmon Marinated in Miso and Baked. Served with a Delicious Miso Sauce, Snow Peas and White Rice."

Now, corporate restaurants exist to maximize profit. The Cheescake Factory is going to use the cheapest ingredients its customers will let it get away with. And if it were to use a pricier alternative to industrial ingredients--say, wild salmon, grass-fed beef, pasture-raised poultry or pork--you can be sure you'd hear about it on the menu (along with a premium in the price tag).

So I think it's pretty safe to assume the salmon in the dish Ruhlman praised--like 90 percent of salmon consumed in the U.S.-- is factory-farmed. And factory-farmed salmon is pretty, well, gross stuff. Where to start?

In a recent Huffington Post article, the respected sustainable-ag writer Dan Imhoff reported that Chile's massive salmon farms--about a third of whose output ends up in the U.S.--are "on the verge of collapse." Here's how Imhoff describes the industry:

Salmon are not indigenous to Chile, but grown in crowded cages installed in the bays and estuaries of the country's otherwise beautiful southern fjord region. These "farmed" Atlantic salmon are fed a steady diet of wild fish--perfectly edible for humans, but more profitable when converted into "value-added" finfish. The approximately three pounds of wild fish needed to produce each pound of farmed salmon has caused some people to refer to finfish aquaculture operations as "reverse protein factories." Equally alarming, salmon farms have become excessively dependent upon toxic pesticides to combat sea lice and antibiotic medicines to thwart viruses that can run rampant among the high concentrations of rapidly growing, penned fish--not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle CAFOs on land.

And as Imhoff reports, the pesticides are no longer working: "According to industry source Intrafish, Chile's 2009 salmon output could decline by as much as 87 percent from last year--a drop from 279,000 metric tons in 2008 to between 37,000 metric tons and 67,000 metric tons." If and when the Chile salmon industry does collapse, it will leave behind a legacy of ecological and social ruin--fishing and farming communities displaced for ephemeral low-paying jobs, once-productive waterways polluted and abandoned.

Mind you, Chile is the globe's second most prodigious source of farmed salmon, after Norway. That country's salmon industry is no day at the beach, either. In his 2008 book Bottomfeeder (must reading for all food politics columnists), Taras Grescoe shows that three enormous Norwegian firms dominate North American salmon farming.

Grescoe documents how these massive operations are snuffing out Washington State's celebrated wild-salmon fishery. The situation is so dire, and the economic benefits of salmon factories are so thin, that Grescoe can find no good reason why Washington officials allow the Norwegian firms to have their way with the shoreline. In the end, he can only speculate that real estate interests are behind the puzzling policy. Prime acres of river-front land are now prohibited from development to protect the salmon run. Let the salmon die, and the rationale for development limits vanishes.

At any rate, it's well-documented that salmon factories spell doom for nearby wild-salmon fisheries. A 2007 Science article doesn't mince words:

We show that recurrent louse infestations of wild juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), all associated with salmon farms, have depressed wild pink salmon populations and placed them on a trajectory toward rapid local extinction.

By 2003, 70 percent of salmon produced in Washington and British Columbia came from farms. A highly productive and energy-efficient source of fabulously delicious and nutritious food is being sacrificed to churn out a vapid and suspect product.

Suspect? Yes. Let's look at the PCB issue. In a 2004 Science paper, researchers stated that "the potential human health risks of farmed salmon consumption have not been examined rigorously" (this, even though "annual global production of farmed salmon has increased by a factor of 40 during the past two decades.") What happened when a rigorous study finally took place?

We show that concentrations of these contaminants are significantly higher in farmed salmon than in wild.

The researchers conclude: "Risk analysis indicates that consumption of farmed Atlantic salmon may pose health risks that detract from the beneficial effects of fish consumption."

That's pretty gross.

Now, while scanning the Cheesecake Factory's listing of seafood offerings, I couldn't help but notice that the chain offers no fewer than five shrimp dishes. Sigh.

"Today, 90 percent of our shrimp--more than 1 billion pounds a year--come from foreign farms," writes Jim Carrier in an excellent recent piece in Orion. In Bottomfeeder, Grescoe puts it like this: "The simple fact is, if you're eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world's poorest nations." Lest anyone think otherwise, these factory farms generate poverty in the nations that house them, as Grescoe demonstrates; they privatize and cut down highly productive mangrove forests that once sustained fishing communities, leaving fetid dead zones in their wake.

So, unless Cheesecake Factory is using rarefied ingredients for dishes like shrimp scampi and miso salmon--let's ignore, for now, the factory-farmed meat or the likely source of winter-season tomatoes--it's pretty damned gross, I'd say. Of course, it's gross in a banal, everyday way: the way that our entire food-production system has us eating gross shit, all the time. Avoiding it takes lots of work; the path of least resistance leads to a gleaming Cheesecake Factory, standing alone at the edge of a strip mall. Fixing the situation won't be easy; but it starts with calling it what it is. 

Now, one brief note on Ezra's fixation on calorie counts and obesity: There's a growing literature suggesting a link between exposure to food-based toxic pollutants like PCBs and obesity/diabetes. See here, here, here,  and here.

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