Finding Sustainable Salmon: Sea to Table

Food and Wine

In this video, explore the journey of salmon from sea to table and what it means to choose sustainable seafood. Featuring the commercial fishermen of Bristol Bay, Alaska, we look at how this fishery supports local communities while protecting one of the world’s most important wild salmon runs. Learn what makes Bristol Bay salmon unique, why sustainability matters, and how conscious choices help preserve this vital resource for generations to come.

Transcript

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.

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