The New Fish. The Global History of Salmon Farming

In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the population of the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers, and designed a new salmon that was fatter, more docile, and faster growing. This was the beginning of a new industry – salmon farming.
The industry spread from coastal Norway to Scotland, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Jobs were created, business boomed, and salmon farmers became extremely rich. A new type of food, the salmon sushi, spread around the globe. But as soon as this new fish was let loose in nature, unexpected things started to happen. Wild salmon stocks disappeared, diseases spread in salmon farms, salmon louse swarmed, and the new industry became highly contested.

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Sætre and Østli has taken a closer look at the salmon industry. For the first time, the global history of salmon farming is told. The result combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords, the coast of Canada, Icelandic landscapes and the far south of Chile with classical muckraking and character-driven literary non-fiction. The authors start out with a question: What happens when you place a new animal in the sea? This book will tell you the answer.