Top US chefs recommend Scottish farmed salmon

Tor-Eddie Fossbakk Decade old tails still lingers on as current truth, despite science and experience to the contrary. With this backdrop, it might come as a big surprise that there is at least one farmed Atlantic salmon variety, Loch Duart salmon that has won over some top US chefs. Loch Duart salmon is raised in farms off the coast of Scotland. According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News online, the Loch Duart salmon is sold at some Bay Area supermarkets for USD 13.99 a pound (USD 30.78 per kilo) for fillets. Several celebrated Northern California restaurants have served it, including the French Laundry in Yountville, the Plumed Horse in Saratoga, and Aqua in San Francisco. Loch Duart, an independently owned Scottish farm that was established in 1999, received a Scottish national honor in 2005, known as the Vision in Business for the Environment for Scotland award. It also was the first salmon farm to receive the Freedom Food certification from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for its fish welfare practices. In the article, Corey Peet, an aquaculture research analyst with the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program, acknowledged that Loch Duart exercises good practices. In general, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Seafood Watch" program recommends avoiding farmed salmon. That's what Loch Duart hopes to do. Loch Duart's farmed salmon, a species that is indigenous to Scotland waters, are raised without hormones or antibiotics. The salmon are fed fishmeal custom-made from sustainable seafood, Mr. O'Shea of CleanFish's San Francisco office told Mercury News. It takes 1.1 pounds of fish meal to grow 1 pound of the salmon. Loch Duart practice fallowing allowing one of its three sites to remain fallow each year, much like crop rotation in agriculture, to allow it to return to a more natural state before production resumes. This is a common practice in all Atlantic salmon farming throughout the world.