You may lose your appetite for salmon for a while when you learn 70% of it is not actually “salmon” colored
Farm-raised salmon are fed such a poor diet they are not actually pink. They’re a pale whitish grey.
And 70 percent of all salmon on the market is farm-raised.
Wild salmon is naturally a bright pinkish-orange thanks to a diet rich in krill and shrimp which contain a reddish-orange compound called astaxanthin.
Farm-raised fish are fed whatever the farmer throws in their pen, which typically includes “kibble” made from highly processed herring, anchovies, corn gluten, ground-up feathers, soybeans, chicken fat and genetically engineered yeast.
Because this diet produces an unappetizing grey-colored fish, food coloring is added to the pellets to “dye” the salmon’s flesh pink.
The coloring is sometimes made “naturally” from pulverized crustaceans and algae, but most often is synthesized in a lab, using petrochemicals.
The color spectrum of natural salmon varies by species. Alaska’s sockeye salmon are the reddest of all, as the Bering Sea is teeming with krill. Coho, king, and pink salmon live farther south where there is less krill and shrimp, making them a lighter orange.
But no wild salmon is grey.
