Over the weekend, my wife and I decided to brave the sweltering Baltimore humidity and fire up the grill.
My colleague Adam Sharp and his family were coming over and I wanted to try out a new recipe: grilled, cedar-plank salmon.
After cooling off over a round of fresh mojitos, I got the grill heated up and brought out the salmon. As soon as the fish hit that smoldering cedar, Adam asked me nonchalantly what type of salmon it was.
“Wild-caught sockeye,” I told him. “You didn't think I'd serve you farmed fish, did ya?”
He laughed. I knew that like myself, Adam values the difference between the increasingly rare wild caught salmon and the farm raised stuff.
While farmed salmon are crammed into tiny pens, doused with antibiotics, and fed unnatural stuff like corn and soy pellets, wild salmon are free to swim and eat stuff like krill — you know, the things fish are supposed to eat.
And from an animal rights perspective, the idea of a magnificently large fish like the salmon living its life in the equivalent of a bathtub-worth of water disturbs me.
But it didn't disturb me as much as what Adam said next...
“Have you heard about the genetically engineered 'super salmon'?” Adam asked.
I told him that I hadn't. While I knew plenty of animals were being genetically modified for various reasons, a “super salmon” wasn't on my radar.
“Yeah, it grows twice as fast as any salmon that exists now,” Adam told me. “I just read that the FDA is getting ready to approve it. And the scary part is... they won't even have to label it.” 
It turns out that the salmon Adam was referring to is being developed by U.S.-based Aqua Bounty Farms.
They've engineered the Atlantic salmon with a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon and a 'genetic on-switch' from the ocean pout, an eel-like fish that's a distant relative of the salmon.
Typically, the Atlantic salmon suspends its growth hormones during periods of cold weather; the ocean pout's on-switch will keep this GM salmon growing year-round without stopping.
So while a conventional salmon may take three years to reach market size, the GM version would reach it in under two.
Now, before you start having nightmares about 50-ton “frankenfish” breeding with conventional salmon and wreaking genetic havoc on the high seas, there are two things to keep in mind:
- The salmon won't grow to monstrous size — they'll just hit standard market size a great deal faster; and
- These salmon won't be able to procreate; the GM fish are all female and completely sterile.
At this point, the FDA has completed their review of five of the seven requirements of the AquaBounty's application to prove the salmon safe for human consumption.
The agency found that the engineering did not harm the animals and that the added genes did not appear to change from generation to generation.
AquaBounty released a statement saying that they were “confident of a successful outcome.”
That successful outcome would mean that in two to three years, this GM salmon will be in your local grocery store and — just like other GM ingredients that are so common in U.S. foods — it will remain unlabeled.
So in a couple years, when my dinner guests ask where the salmon came from... I may have to sigh and tell them they're eating sterile female salmon, straight from a laboratory.
Be Well,
Jimmy
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