Farmed Norwegian Salmon World’s Most Toxic Food

ruticker 07.03.2025 7:25:23

Recognized text from YouScriptor channel Marcus Guiliano

Recognized from a YouTube video by YouScriptor.com, For more details, follow the link Farmed Norwegian Salmon World’s Most Toxic Food

A rural road in Western Norway, surrounded by glaciers and cliffs, winds as intricately as the shores of the fjords. After hours of searching, I finally reach my destination: floating on cold water, fish farms wherein lie one of the country's most hidden treasures—farmed salmon. In these deserted places, surrounded by fences and closed doors, I have an appointment with a man who wants to reveal what he considers to be a scandal hidden under the waters of the fjords. **Kurt Odal** is one of Norway's most respected environmental activists. He has gone to war against salmon farmers who, according to him, are responsible for a large-scale health disaster. "It is a disaster," he states. "Today, you have a pandemic because PD and ISA are spread all over Norway, and they don’t want to tell it to the customers, like the people in France." Over the last ten years, Kurt Odal has placed these factory farms under strict surveillance, gathering evidence. Today, he wants to reveal to me the practices of these Norwegian fish farmers whom he considers dangerous. In the images he filmed, he claims that these men are pouring a powerful pesticide into these waters, one known to have neurotoxic effects. They must protect themselves with work suits and gas masks from chemicals used to treat salmon attacked by pests and diseases that abound in these farms. "You will find different kinds of **evertebrates**, fluvaleron, and all kinds of chemicals," he explains. "That's disgusting. Norwegian salmon is the most toxic food you have in the whole world." This toxic fish is regularly sold in our supermarkets, and Norwegian salmon is not the only species concerned. To verify these accusations, I spent several months investigating behind the scenes in the fishing industry. The ultimate health food recommended by doctors and nutritionists, fish has retained its image as a healthy and natural product. Yet, its flesh holds many secrets, among the most toxic in the agricultural food industry. From Norway to Vietnam, via Sweden and Denmark, I investigated the ins and outs of this global industry—fish livestock, fish products, and also prepared dishes. We’re going to dive into the murky waters of an out-of-control industry, which, to our knowledge, is pouring a dangerous cocktail of chemicals into the food that reaches our tables. In France, fish consumption has more than doubled over the last 50 years, now reaching **37 lbs** per year per capita—that's more than beef or chicken. To meet the demand, new fish have appeared. Today, fish shops hardly resemble those of the past. "Hello, young man. What would you like?" "I'd like two salmon fillets, please." "Okay." In this Parisian fish shop, the salmon is Scottish, the bass is Greek, and apart from the trout, not a French fish to be seen. "We have very little French fish because we know that's not what we're getting. They just say it's from certain zones in the North Atlantic." A few years ago, we had a lot more precise information. Today, the vast majority of fish consumed in France is imported, and nearly half of it is farmed fish. "We have farmed sea bass and bream. Approximately 60% is fish from the sea, and the rest is farmed fish, which are much cheaper than fished products." Such as these farmed salmon fillets or these panga fillets at **€12.90** per kilo—it's the cheapest fish in the store. "That allows some people to be able to eat fish inexpensively. They can't afford to buy cod fillets at **€32** a kilo. It sells very well." Relatively unknown until ten years ago, today panga is one of the ten most consumed fish in France. It can be found in fish shops and also in most supermarkets as frozen fillets. Thanks to its low price, panga has become especially prevalent in the mass catering business, to the point of becoming one of the most consumed fishes in school lunches. How have these farmed fish products been able to be offered at such low prices, and what exactly can be found in the flesh of these fish which is being served to our children? In southern Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta, the first step of my investigation begins. Here, panga is part of the culinary traditions, sold in the markets and consumed every day in restaurants. But behind this traditional image lies another reality. For 15 years, panga has also become one of the principal money-makers of the region. Ninety-five percent of global production comes from southern Vietnam. In the small village of Canto in the Delta, a statue has been erected to it, right next to that of Ho Chi Minh, the father of the country's independence. I am to discover that this economic success also hides a darker side—exploiting the inhabitants as well as the environment. On the river, I have an appointment with a busy man whom the Vietnamese call the **Panga King**, Mr. Min. In just under 15 years, he has amassed the fourth richest fortune in the country thanks to his fish farms. He exports panga to more than 30 different countries, including France. For the first time, he has accepted to open his doors to television cameras. "Hello, Mr. Min." "The big fish are feeding over there." "No, let's just show them the little fish. They're hungrier. Let's go over there." Mr. Min's fortune can be found entirely under the water of these fish ponds. To understand its magnitude, you must come here early in the morning and watch the show while the fish have their breakfast. In each one of these ponds, **300,000 pangas**—an industrial concentration for a voracious fish. "We feed these panga twice a day, and each time we give them three tons of food. That's how we feed them—stuffed with dry pellet feed, bloated with fat and protein. The fish reach adult size in just six months, two times faster than in nature." To ensure production, Mr. Min has over **350 ponds** of this kind. "On my farms, there are **100 million panga**. You must realize there are more fish in my ponds than there are people in all of Vietnam." After six months of farming, **25 tons** of fish have been harvested per pond. But for panga, it is only the beginning of their journey to the plates on European tables. For maximum consumer appeal, Mr. Min will put them through a radical transformation in one of his eight fish processing plants. In less than an hour, they will become frozen fillets filled with additives, ready for export. To prepare the fish which will be sold at low prices on the European market, more than **a thousand workers** process up to **100 tons** of panga per day. Employee compensation depends on their performance—up to **€150** per month. But to do that, they must keep up the pace: on average, **10 seconds per fillet**, **10 hours a day**. The more they work, the more they earn—that's the rule here. Before freezing, one last step is necessary, and that begins in these large washers. In this water, polyphosphates—additives which facilitate freezing—also allow the fillets to soak up water, artificially increasing their weight. In the end, the fish are tasteless and odorless. But surprisingly to Mr. Min, that is an advantage for exportation. "Unlike other fish, panga has no odor and it's tasteless as well, so it takes on the flavors of the spices added to it. So suddenly, it's become a favorite of kitchens throughout the world. That's the secret of panga." Every year, Vietnam exports **1.5 billion** of these low-cost, colorless, and odorless fillets, **20%** of the production coming from Mr. Min's plants. In his freight depot, several thousand tons are being shipped to Spain, the Ukraine, as well as Brazil, but also, according to Mr. Min, to certain French supermarkets. "Okay, this is the bill for our fish which is being sent to Carrefour. It goes through a middleman because Carrefour doesn't buy from us directly. There's a wholesaler who buys a shipment from us and resells part of it to Carrefour." In Mr. Min's panga, we didn't find anything that would raise health concerns. But on other fish farms, some fish have flesh with dangerous chemical cocktail concentrations. Most farmed panga are sick because of the pollution from the Mekong waters. Mr. Wean is the local representative of the WWF. In 2009, this association put panga on its red list of products which are dangerous to the environment as well as to the consumer. "Look, there's a fish farm there—a panga right there." The panga on this farm are raised in water directly pumped into the channel, one of thousands of small tributaries of the Mekong with high pollution levels. The pollution can be seen with the naked eye; you only have to compare the color of these small channels with that of the main river. "It's much darker." "Why is that?" "It's because of all the human activity around it." "Human activity in here?" "Yeah, into these channels, millions of Vietnamese dump their household waste on a daily basis. The region is also the world's largest rice exporter, with intensive cultivation practices that spread massive amounts of pesticides. Faced with this cocktail of pollutants, the waters have reached high alert status. These channels concentrate green algae and bacteria which destroy the oxygen and release toxins into the water." "The water can make the panga sick?" "Yes, because by reducing the oxygen levels in the water, it affects the immune system and the health of the fish." To treat their panga sickened by pollution, farmers pour industrial quantities of drugs into the ponds. "This is a big farm, yes?" Patrick Kont is a researcher at the University of Namur in Belgium. He came to help this farmer treat his sick panga. "They do not have too many problems with diseases on the body." "Oh yes, to their bodies. And there is also bleeding in the fin areas." "Yes, bleeding." "Oh yes, yeah. He fights with the problem with the... and they also get a liver disease in the liver." "Yes, yeah. Does he have some stages?" Patrick Kont is going to discover that to treat the fish, farmers use dangerous doses of drugs. "Plenty of chemicals here." "Okay, yes, yes. Here you can see the antibiotics in this local pharmacy. There are hundreds of boxes of antibiotics of all kinds, heavily used on the farms. They cause a chain reaction. The problem is that there are always residues found in the environment, and eventually, the bacteria become resistant to these antibiotics regularly administered to the fish. These antibiotics heighten the diseases they are supposed to fight, forcing the producers to raise the dosages—a vicious circle. Because today, the farmer can't avoid it. If the fish consume the antibiotics, they become absorbed into its tissues and will be released as a form of residue via feces, via excretions. Then these antibiotic residues will be found elsewhere in the channels, to the point where they can also spread to other farms because these waters are also used by other fish farms." To stop this vicious cycle, Patrick Kont is trying to promote less polluting drugs, but they are much too expensive for farmers who complain about the market prices of their fish being offered by Western distributors. "Oh yes, our production costs are **23,000 dong** per kilo, but our selling price is only **22,000 dong**, so we're already losing money." "Okay, so no good for the business, huh?" "But sometimes it's after the antibiotics." Patrick Kont will make an even more disturbing discovery: **fat mangan gluconate**, **copper gluconate**—not antibiotics, but chemicals and pesticides that concentrate in fish flesh and in the Mekong waters. Dry feed pellets, which make the panga grow twice as fast as from natural food, and a record number of fish concentrated in the ponds—these farming conditions put consumers' health at risk. Here in Vietnam is where my investigation ends because there haven't been any independent scientific studies conducted here on the subject. To find the answer, I am to return to a country that has pushed the use of chemicals and industrial farming techniques even further. In Norway, fish farming is a **€4 billion** a year industry. This is the second biggest resource of the country after oil. Seventy percent of the salmon consumed in France comes from these farms, which are directly immersed in the waters of the fjords. But in this secret and opaque world, journalists are not welcome, and no fish farmer has agreed to open its doors to us. Once again, I find Kurt Odal, the activist who fights against the methods used by the Norwegian fish farmers to unlock the secrets of the fish farms. His organization has employed methods worthy of a spy movie—this boat and also an underwater robot with which he probes the waters of the fjords. "It's filled with bacteria. There in the bubbles, this layer is full of waste under the farms—mountains of sediment **15 m** high, where there is a mixture of food scraps and chemicals which are poured into the farms every day. It's incredibly polluted there." "What kind of elements is this?" "This considers all the toxic substances sprayed for the fish to deal with, and it contains the fish itself. You see, the sea bottom is completely destroyed. You know, and that's a gas factory. It bubbles up with all kinds of methane. Some of these pesticides they're using are the same that was used during the First World War to gas people." They have complete protection—gloves, everything. The main problem for Norwegian fish farmers is this parasite, the **sea lice**. It lodges in the fish flesh and can kill them, becoming resistant to all the treatments. It forces the farmers to use pesticides that are more and more potent. These farming conditions produce frightening consequences in the fish, like in these cod deformed by genetic mutations. "This is an escaped cod from a fish farm. Nearly **50%** of the cod is born like this, and they can never close them out. This is genetic damage. It takes eight generations in the sea to get this away, you understand?" "Yeah." "And female cod of this type is known to get pregnant with the wild male cod. See the beautiful faces? You know you don't eat things like this, but if you chop the head off, you wouldn't see it." "Salmon also suffer less visible but equally disturbing transformations. See, this is a much smaller tail. It has bigger tails with more sharp corners, and the shell is not covering the gills. You know, that's very normal." What we find inside the fish is even worse. "Typical. This is... no, what the hell? See this? This is a fresh salmon. You see how it's breaking? This is no good fish. You know, you should be able to tug back and forth. It shouldn't break like this. A wild salmon contains **5% to 7%** fat; this contains between **12% and 34%** fat, you understand? And since the toxic is always following the fat, you know this is the most toxic food you have in the world." Since these fish have more fat, the flesh of farmed fish absorbs higher levels of chemical residues. The observations of Kurt Odal have now been confirmed by the studies of a French researcher, **Jerome Rousan**, who works for the University of Bergen in Norway. He measured the concentration of toxic chemicals present in various food products, and the results he obtained are enlightening. Different colors represent different pollutants. "You have different food products: hamburger, whole milk, eggs, apples, potatoes, cod, and farmed salmon. That's incredible! We can see from the chart that the farmed fish has much higher levels than the other products. Compared to other products, we can see very clearly that farmed salmon contains much more pollutant. You can see the number as well as I can. Farmed fish is **five times** more toxic than all the other products found in our supermarkets." For Jerome Rousan, the conclusion is obvious: "Do you still eat farmed fish?" "No, no, I don't." "You've stopped?" "Since these studies, you simply must avoid exposure to these pollutants by ingesting them. You're exposed, that's obvious." Because it's not only about measuring these pollutants; it's also about evaluating their effects. On these laboratory rats, here we have a test group that we used as the control group, where the mice ate standard laboratory food, and we tested them. Then we had another test group that had exactly the same food, except that we added farmed salmon to it. For the test group fed with the farmed salmon, he obtained some very disturbing results. "What we have here is our fatty tissue from the abdomen. If you look at what happens to the farmed salmon, it's pretty impressive. Eating farmed fish has made them obese and diabetic. If organisms are exposed to different pollutants, some of these pollutants are going to make the organism accumulate more fat. So a theory has been formulated which correlates obesity being a consequence of all the pollutants we encounter in the environment." Jerome Rousan then makes another revelation. According to his research, what makes the salmon flesh most toxic is not the pesticide poured into the farms, but rather the dry pellet feed which is fed to the fish. "The pollutants come mainly from the food which is fed to the salmon." "What are these pollutants?" "There are dioxins, PCBs, dieldrin, aldrin, toxins—all these chemicals." "How is it that this is found in the dry pet feed?" "Well, you'll have to ask those who make the fish feed. What is certain is that the effect can be huge. That's what's dangerous—simple dry pellet feed, which is even more dangerous than pesticides and antibiotics." How is it made, and why is it so toxic? The small port of Tiberon in Western Denmark—here, fishing boats don't supply fish markets or supermarkets. This factory makes fish feed. **Finn Neelen** is the factory foreman. "Here's our product—dry fish pellets. These pellets are made from the flesh of freshly caught fish. That day, a shipment of sand eels was sucked directly into the ship's holds through this pipe, which carries them to the processing workshops." "Why do you use these eels for your feed pellets?" "Because it's a fatty fish. It contains protein but also a lot of oil and so on. What interests him are fatty fish." And do you know, in his factory, **20%** come from the Baltic Sea? And it's there where the problem starts. The Baltic is one of the most polluted seas in the world, and some of the species they catch there have become toxic, contaminating the pellets but also the entire food chain. In Sweden, I have an appointment with **Jan Isacson**, a Greenpeace activist. He brings me to a fish shop to buy fish caught in the region. "Hello, I'd like some herring and salmon, please." But before selling them to us, the fishmonger is going to say something rather surprising. She's warning us about her own merchandise. "It's not very big. This is Baltic herring. You should be careful. People are very much aware they don't eat it more than at the most once a week. And the same thing with the eel. If you're pregnant, you shouldn't eat the fish from the Baltic at all." If she gives this warning, it is thanks to the work of Jan and the Swedish government, which have started giving public health warnings against eating Baltic fish, especially fatty fish like salmon or herring. "It contains high levels of dioxins, and it's one of the most powerful toxic pollutants that we know of today. Extremely low levels of dioxins can have effects on your hormone systems. It can cause cancer." To find the source of this pollution, we don't have to look very far. "So let's try this small road, just an hour's drive outside of Stockholm, to this chemical plant which turns Swedish trees into paper. Paper mills like this are historically one of the main sources of dioxin pollution. So it's quite natural to find it in here in high concentrations." Here, Swedish chemicals are not the only polluter around the Baltic Sea. Nine highly industrialized countries, including Germany and Russia, dump their chemical waste into an almost closed sea whose waters are not renewed for **30 years**. The chemicals are concentrated here and end up in the fish. "These pollutants bind to the fat in your body, and especially, and that's why salmon and herring are extra vulnerable to this pollutant, because they have very fatty meat, which we like because of the omega-3. But at the same time, they bind a lot of these very, very dangerous toxics. These chemicals then move up the food chain. The more fatty the fish, the more the pollutants are absorbed into the flesh. Some, such as pesticides or PCBs, are never eliminated and are called persistent organic pollutants. Moving up the food chain, they concentrate more and more in the fatty tissues. At the end of the chain, a kilo of tuna or salmon is much more toxic than a kilo of small fish. Consequently, some fatty fish from the Baltic have become unfit for consumption, so they are harder to find on the consumer's plate. So they find themselves in heavy demand in the market for making dry pellet fish feed, and that's where the toxicity builds up." Up back to Tiberon in the dry pellet feed plant, Finn Neelen cooks the fatty fish in large ovens. At the end of the line, he obtains two very different products: firstly, protein powder, and secondly, fish oil. These two ingredients are used to create a finished product, and each of them, in their own way, will contribute to the contamination of the pellets. Let's begin with the oil. By concentrating in the fatty parts, it accelerates the buildup of the pollutants. This is why farmed fish are more susceptible than wild fish. Protein powders, in turn, pose another problem—one even worse. It's at the end of the line that I find it, in this large chemical container. The antioxidant ends up in the protein powder; here, it's called **Aoxy**. Aoxy is a product that Finn Neelen uses extensively, but apparently, he doesn't know anything about what it is used for. "What happens if you don't use it?" "I don't know what it is. I just know I have to put it in." Why is this mysterious chemical used, and does it pose a threat to consumers? This is the story of one of the best-kept secrets of the food processing industry. At first glance, a toxic substance has no place in a food factory. The product was registered in 1959 by Monsanto, the giant U.S. chemical company, in the category of pesticides. It was used to treat rubber, but also fruits and vegetables. Its use is strictly regulated and limited. What is it doing in fish feed? The answer can be found in Switzerland, in Geneva, in this anti-fraud laboratory. Two years ago, Patrick Eder and D.D. Ortelli were surprised to find Atox in the flesh of farmed fish in extremely high levels—well above the **50 micrograms per kilogram** permitted in foodstuffs. "The reference value is 50, so we're looking at this level, and we see that in our fish, the measurements are **10 to 20 times** more than this standard. Concentrations of between **500 and 800 micrograms** per kilogram have been found, so they're extremely higher than the norm. We don't see that in wild fish. This is logical since they're not fed fish meal. On the other hand, all the fish coming from the aquaculture industry are contaminated with Atox." Before them, nobody had ever thought to look for Atox in fish, and for good reason. The product is supposed to protect fruits and vegetables, but meal manufacturers have found another use for it. In fact, it's put into the fish meal to prevent the fat, which is present, from becoming rancid, thus ensuring the quality of the fat. The problem is that the manufacturers of the dry meal pellets did not notify the health authorities of the change in use. The result? Atox levels are strictly controlled in fruits and vegetables and even meat, but not in fish. It's paradoxical that there are standards set for cats and chickens, but no standards for fish. Even worse, you can find standards set for kangaroos and reptiles, but none at all for fish. Patrick Eder made an even stranger discovery: the effects of Atox on human health have actually never been evaluated by the **EFSA** (European Food Safety Authority). "A lot of things are missing. If you take a hard look at the EFSA's report concerning long-term toxicity and aspects related to cancer, no valid studies have been submitted concerning the levels of toxicity in reproduction or fetal development. No valid studies have been submitted on neurotoxicity either. So after all, the EFSA could not even establish an acceptable daily intake level because it claims it was not able to calculate due to insufficient data." If such a substance is to be introduced to the marketplace, it certainly shouldn't have been done using such weak studies. Only one serious study has been published; it comes from a Norwegian researcher. "We have found almost nothing except this thesis which was written in Norway." I decided to track down this researcher. She defended her thesis in Bergen, in Western Norway, in this state research institute, the **NIFES**. However, since then, she has lost her job there, so I found her at home, working with a toxicologist, **Victoria Bone**. At first, she discovered that nobody—not even the manufacturer, Monsanto—had any idea of the effects of this chemical on human health. "In fact, no one asked if it was a safe product. They just assumed that it wouldn't pose a problem." "I don't know, but it's not been investigated." "No, but that's crazy! You're not supposed to put something in our food without investigation." "Yes." After several years of work, she made six major discoveries concerning this product, each one more disturbing than the others. "I discovered that Atox has the power to cross the blood-brain barrier." "What we know about the blood-brain barrier is that it exists as a physical means to protect the brain from toxic substances. No foreign substance to the human body is supposed to be able to pass through it and diffuse into the brain." "But this substance can still go through?" "Yes, so that's really bad." "Yes, it's really bad. Of course, this discovery should have been published as quickly as possible." "Yes, as soon as possible." In her opinion, this could lead to brain contamination, but also probable carcinogenic effects. The problem is that over the last few years, Victoria Bone hasn't been able to publish any of her results in a scientific journal. "Why can you not make it?" "Because I'm no longer employed at the Institute. I lost my status as a researcher, and suddenly I didn't have the right to publish my scientific research." At the end of her thesis, despite her many discoveries, Victoria Bone had indeed left the state research institute officially voluntarily. But I was about to discover that the reality was a bit different from the official version. "Because I finally decided that I no longer wanted to deal with this question anymore." "Why? You say you have six publications ready. You seem like you want to publish it. You seem frustrated." "I mean, if you will take away the camera, then we can talk first about this and then off camera." Victoria Bone confirms that she had been pressured, and there were even some attempts to falsify some of her results. "I can tell you now this in the hope of finding a job and one day publishing her research. She chose not to denounce these practices in the media, but others have done so before her. Because she was not the first who had been forced out. In 2006, this woman, **Claudet Betun**, also a researcher at the NIFES, had also measured the presence of hazardous substances in salmon. In a Norwegian newspaper, she had accused her superiors and the Ministry of Fisheries of pressuring her and falsifying her findings." Four years ago, research funding for Atox was cut by the Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries, and according to Kurt Odal, this decision may have been made under pressure from the Minister of Fisheries herself. "She is also the author of the food security system that's controlling the fish farm diseases, and she controls the food authorities. She controls all things that have to do with fish farming in Norway, and she uses her power in a bad manner. So she gives them orders to take down this thesis, take it down from one to two, so we can sell the fish. So we don't lose money. We have to sell the fish that's infected and sick." To verify these accusations, I decided to speak with this minister in Brussels. In the aisles of a trade show, I have an appointment with her for a five-minute interview, but the time allotted to me will be much shorter. "The people at the NIFES say they're trying to do some research about a substance called Atox, but they say they don't have money to do it. Are you going to fund some research about Atox?" "Uh, I'm sorry, I don't know about that search program, so I can't say anything about that now. I think for the moment we are here to talk about the seafood exposition, and that's what we're doing." Quickly, a communications officer puts an end to the interview. "I'm sorry, the interview is—" "Yeah, but I couldn't ask all my questions." "That's how it is. Okay, we have a very tight schedule." So the minister does not wish to talk about Atox. Arranged for us, she claims to know nothing about it. My question, however, if we take the time to check her CV, which is posted on the ministry's website, we learn that she worked for four years as a consultant for **EWOS**, the world leader in dry fish meal pellets, just before being hired as a consultant to the Ministry of Fisheries. Since then, she has held dozens of jobs in the salmon industry and has even led one of the main lobbies, the **FHL** (Professional Union). According to Kurt Odal, there is still some missing information from her impressive CV. "All the management authorities have their own interest in fish farming. She's owning **8%** of a big fish farm, and her director is owning **20%** of another fish farm. So this is what we call corruption, and this is like the Italian mafia." The accusation may be outrageous, but the facts are there, hidden by a simple financial arrangement. It was enough for me to examine the records of this company called **JMJ Invest**. The minister is the major shareholder, and JMJ Invest actually possesses more than **10%** of a major Norwegian salmon farm, of which several other shareholders are members of the minister's family. Toxic fish, researchers muzzled, a minister with a conflict of interest. I left Norway a little surprised by what I had just learned, but my investigation is not quite finished yet. I still have to discover how these fish sometimes make it to our plates without us even knowing it. All it takes is for a manufacturer to decide to discreetly mislabel a product—exactly as what happened in the horse meat scandal. In Boulogne, the main French fishing port, some companies are not happy just selling fish; they also produce a product totally unknown to consumers, which is widely used in prepared dishes. This day, a shipment of cod from the Baltic arrives. On one side, the fillets are piling up; on the other, the waste, which will not be lost. "What are you filling in here?" "It's a small cod." **Luc Sjan** works for a company specializing in the processing of fish waste. "Once the cod fillet has been removed—in this case, it's a cod—we see that there's still a lot of flesh that can be extracted by pulping for use in processed foods, such as rillettes, for example. So it gives added value to what was previously regarded as waste. Only a few years ago, and today it's become a highly valued resource." Highly valued and, most importantly, not very expensive. These remains, which are processed into our prepared meals, are bought by **LC Salons** for less than **15 cents** a kilo. Some of them are loaded into these refrigerated containers; others go directly into these dump trucks and are transported to this plant where nothing is lost. Firstly, the fish skins are recovered for use in the cosmetic industry, as to the heads and the flesh that remains attached to the bones. They are sent to be processed in this workshop. But when we arrived, all of the machines had been turned off, even though it's pretty clear that they had recently been in use. Just before our visit, the boss of the plant ordered the production line to be shut down. Showing the workshop procedures doesn't bother him; he's just afraid that consumers would be shocked if they saw what the pulp looks like. We still managed to film what the boss wanted to avoid being shown with a hidden camera. In another workshop, it's of this pulp machine in action, crushing the waste and extracting the shapeless mash—a not very appetizing substance which is called the pulp. Once washed, here is what the finished product looks like. This one was made from the remains of a fatty fish, trout. "What can that pulp be used for?" "For example, it's usually used in prepared meals, but also in a lot of pet foods." "In what? For feeding dogs and cats?" "The advantage of this product is, first and foremost, its price. The pulp sells for around **€1.30** per kilo—10 times cheaper than a fish fillet. So it's really in demand for food manufacturers, especially since they are not required to indicate on their products' labels that they contain pulp." A plant which makes prepared meals in Western France. This morning, fraud control teams make a surprise inspection. "Hello, Mr. Emer, head of the social protection department." "Hello, welcome." **Jean-Michel Emer** came to inspect the stocks of this famous brand food processing company and this cod and potato pie. He wants to check its composition. "So this is the list of ingredients you have: water, cod **23%**, made up exclusively of cod and salt." So the professional's job is to determine if there is indeed **23%** of the pure product in this meal. Pure product, in a manner of speaking. When a prepared meal is labeled, for example, "made with cod" without adding the words "fish fillet," it is usually made with pulp. "You cut off the edges and you take sample pieces from the middle." Jean-Michel Emer wants to check that the composition of the pulp block corresponds to what is indicated on the label. "So here we have a block of fish flesh which has been compressed because it's a frozen product. So obviously, it's easier to hide other fish species by mixing them in with the cod than it would be if they were presented as fillets." After the horse meat scandal, fish is also in the sights of the fraud control department. The samples are sent for DNA analysis to the **Marseille National Analysis Laboratory**, led by **Frédéric Salon**. Identifying fish is a long and complex process. According to a recent U.S. study, one out of three fish labels is misleading, and that's the case with our pulp sample. "It says there are several things in it. This shows there's a part of Pacific cod and there are three parts of Alaskan pollock, as we see here on the Alaskan pollock comparison sample." "So roughly speaking, we have Pacific cod and Alaskan pollock?" "Yes, but Alaskan pollock hasn't been mentioned as an ingredient." "No, so that's illegal." "It's an anomaly. We'll have to have the professional explain the possible origin of the Alaskan pollock in the pulp of this raw material. We shouldn't exclude the possibility of the accidental origin of the fish or simply the fact that Alaskan pollock is cheaper than Pacific cod, which could be a case of fraud." And you also have another kind of possible fraud, which would be passing off a farmed fish as a wild one—pollock in place of cod. In pulp, species substitutions are much more frequent and pose a problem of traceability. Today, the entire fish industry may be affected by these health concerns, so much so that some health professionals are completely changing their viewpoints concerning fish. **Jean L. Mu** is an oncologist. Today, he is hosting an awareness-raising workshop on the causes of cancer for these women, all of whom are affected by the disease. "Our goal is not to go after the guilty parties, but rather to take measures that will help prevent recurrence. And among the many causes that may lead to cancer, fish has become one of his concerns. Simple advice: don't eat much big fish like salmon or tuna—not more than once or twice a month." "You should eat small fish rich in omega-3s if possible." "For someone who has breast cancer, I would recommend small fish." "Eating fish may affect my health, is that what you're saying?" "Yes, yes. Before, it was good because of its measurable constituents, rich in omega-3s in particular and vitamin D. You weren't given a spoonful of cod liver oil during your childhood for nothing because it was rich in vitamin D and was beneficial to your health. But suddenly, we find fish that is full of pesticides and mercury. And if it's fish from Finland, we know that there is a lot of radioactivity still 20 years after Chernobyl. So it's fish that shouldn't be eaten. It's fish that's full of radioactivity, mercury, heavy metals, PCBs, dioxins, etc. It's just not the same anymore." So the message has to be different because, unfortunately, things have changed. For 30 years, the French health authorities had encouraged unlimited fish consumption. This summer, they lowered their recommendations: no more than two servings of fish per week. One way to prevent or anticipate what could be our next food scandal.

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