00:00On a quest to buy sustainable salmon, I travel to Alaska to see the source of wild salmon.
00:05I'm on the boat of Captain Corey Arnold, a professional photographer from White Salmon,
00:09Washington. He spends summers at Graveyard Point, an abandoned cannery that serves as a
00:13summer fish camp for a community of commercial fishermen. Bristol Bay is the world's largest
00:17stronghold of wild salmon. Every summer, 50 million salmon swim through Bristol Bay on
00:22their way home to their natal streams. Our boat is a set netting skiff. We anchor one end of the
00:26gill net on shore and pull the other end across a superhighway of salmon migrating close to shore.
00:31Fish must be iced within two hours of being caught. So we deliver a load to a tender, a boat that keeps
00:36them in refrigerated seawater and transports them to a processing plant where a disassembly line of
00:41machines and humans turn whole fish into fillets. Fish are filleted, packaged, and flash frozen,
00:46usually within 12 to 36 hours of being caught. This means they might be fresher than the never-frozen
00:50fish at a seafood counter in the lower 48. From the processor, my frozen fish are loaded into
00:55refrigerated containers. These are barged to Seattle, trucked to Bellingham, Washington,
01:00and boxed for delivery in Portland. Here's what I've learned. Nearly all of the salmon we produce
01:04in the United States is wild, and we export it. Most of the salmon we eat is farmed in other
01:09countries. If I want to support small-scale fishermen and self-sustaining wild runs, wild salmon,
01:14specifically sockeye from Bristol Bay, is the best and simplest choice I can make in line with my values.
Comments