{"id":5134,"date":"2023-01-01T17:36:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-01T22:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/?p=5134"},"modified":"2024-09-29T18:19:24","modified_gmt":"2024-09-29T22:19:24","slug":"somethings-fishy-about-lox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/news\/somethings-fishy-about-lox\/","title":{"rendered":"Something’s Fishy About Lox"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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This content was originally published by the Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA), a project of Farm Forward from 2016 through 2024. JIFA is now the\u00a0Center for Jewish Food Ethics<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps few food items are more closely associated with Ashkenazi Jewish American culture than lox, bagels and cream cheese.<\/h2>\n

Whether\u00a0brined or smoked<\/a>, lox is, fundamentally, a cured meat. True lox (salmon) has fallen out of favor in recent decades due to its intense saltiness, and milder smoke-salt hybrids such as\u00a0nova lox<\/a>\u00a0are now the preferred choice, but the Jewish taste for cured salmon is as strong as ever. In the past few years, American consumers have broken\u00a0seafood consumption records<\/a>, hitting 19 pounds per capita in 2019. Although much of the seafood category is\u00a0treyf<\/em>, or non-kosher to observant Jews, cured salmon is a significant part of those record-breaking numbers: Americans eat on average over four pounds of canned and cured fish alone per person every year. What most of these consumers don\u2019t realize is where that fish comes from.<\/p>\n

Just as we\u2019re fed images of grass-fed cows, we\u2019re led to believe that fish are taken from the ocean. Wild-caught salmon is no longer standard industry practice. What we think of as \u201cfishing\u201d is more accurately aquaculture. For\u00a0a decade<\/a>\u00a0now, more fish globally have been farmed than caught, and in the case of salmon,\u00a0the ratio sits<\/a>\u00a0at about 4:1, the three million farmed salmon far outnumbering their wild-caught counterparts. Norway and Chile raise about\u00a080 percent of the world\u2019s farmed salmon<\/a>, with Canada, Britain, and the Faroe Islands rounding out the top five producers.\u00a0Over two million metric tons<\/a>\u00a0of salmon are farmed every year. That\u2019s a lot of lox.<\/p>\n

But long before lox becomes lox, salmon roe are\u00a0scooped a pitcherful at a time<\/a>\u00a0into freshwater incubator trays, and once hatched, they are moved from plastic tub to plastic tub until finally they become physiologically compatible with saltwater pens. The experience of a farmed fish is nearly devoid of opportunities for natural behaviors. Farmed fish don\u2019t migrate, farmed fish don\u2019t meet members of other species, and farmed fish don\u2019t hunt. Normally predators in the wild, farmed salmon feed on pellets made up of ground-up fish also likely farmed at an aquaculture operation.<\/p>\n

As with farmed land animals, farmed fish live in crowded and cramped conditions and may suffer from lesions and debilitating injuries. Stressful conditions cause disease and parasite outbreaks, like sea lice, that farmers respond to with\u00a0pesticides and antibiotics<\/a>. These treatment measures promote resistant strains of diseases that can harm both wild fish populations and\u00a0public health<\/a>. Given what we know about\u00a0fishes\u2019 capacity for stress and pain<\/a>, aquaculture is abysmal for animal welfare.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say \u201cwild caught\u201d fish is preferable to farmed. Overfishing has been an ongoing problem for decades. The North Atlantic cod fishery\u00a0memorably collapsed in the early 1990s<\/a>. Though the Canadian government put the kibosh on cod fishing back in 1992, populations still haven\u2019t recovered. Perhaps the most significant problem with industrial fishing is bycatch: 40 percent of what fishermen catch in their trawlers is not what they mean to catch. Thirty-eight million tons of sea creatures<\/a>\u00a0are unintentionally caught every year, their corpses routinely dumped back into the ocean to make room in the nets for the next catch. This poses a threat not just to the millions of jellyfish, sharks, octopuses, urchins, skates, and unmarketable species of fish who are killed, but also to endangered species such as migrating loggerhead turtles, dolphins, and\u00a0whales<\/a> who can die from entanglement in fishing gear. The fishing industry is also a significant source of modern slavery<\/a>, where people are trapped on remote fishing vessels in brutal conditions.<\/p>\n

The true cost of fishing is always higher than it appears. From preserving wild habitats and species to caring for vulnerable workers, there are many\u00a0Jewish values-based reasons<\/a>\u00a0to commit to alternatives to industrial fishing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animal-product-labeling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}