Frozen salmon is better for the planet than fresh, because it takes so much less energy to make it safely to your dinner plate.
That’s the finding of Portland-based Ecotrust, which studied how sustainable it really is to catch fish, keep them cold and fly them to markets around the world — instead of flash-freezing at sea and then shipping to market later, by truck or rail.
“We said, ‘Eat wild salmon,'” said Astrid Scholz, vice president of knowledge systems at Ecotrust and one of the report’s authors. “But it made me a little uneasy…. There’s something wrong about catching an Alaska salmon, putting it on a helicopter, and then putting it on a jet to Moscow and then to New York so someone can eat their $50 dinner of fresh Copper River salmon.”
Scholtz was joined in her research by Ulf Sonesson, a researcher at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology; and Peter Tydemers, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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