Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry

by Richard Flanagan

And so we discover that a food product marketed as capable of treating cancer, of miraculously increasing male virility and restoring women’s beauty, is in reality a compound of synthetic dye, antibiotics, petrochemical derivatives, the macerated remains of battery hen beaks, skulls, claws, guts and feathers once destined for abattoir waste streams, along with fishmeal made from jeopardised fish stocks stabilised with a pesticide also used to stop car tyres cracking that happens to be a carcinogen, and soy meal that has possible links to slave labour and the deforestation of the Amazon and the destruction of the Cerrado and that drives global heating. What salmon actually eat is, finally, what we eat when we eat Tasmanian salmon: secrets and lies.