What's Really On Your Plate When You Order "Sustainable" Farmed Fish
The salmon fillet looks pristine in the grocery store case — pinkish-orange, neatly trimmed, labeled with a certification seal that suggests it was raised responsibly somewhere clean and cold. It might even carry a "Best Aquaculture Practices" stamp or some variation of "sustainably sourced." For most American men tossing it in their cart after reading about the health benefits of omega-3s, the story ends there. But a sweeping, five-year investigation published this month by The Outlaw Ocean Project — a Washington, D.C.-based journalism nonprofit — has ripped that label clean off, revealing a supply chain entangled with ocean depletion, forced labor, toxic chemicals, and geopolitical complicity that reaches from the coast of West Africa to the mountains of western China and directly onto American dinner tables.
The investigation was led by Ian Urbina, a former New York Times reporter who now runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, and involved more than 70 reporters working over five years. Their findings: the seafood on your plate can be downstream from "forced labor, rancid waste, harmful chemicals." The results were published in The New York Times Magazine and represent one of the most comprehensive examinations of the global aquaculture industry ever attempted by a journalistic organization.
The Great Aquaculture Myth
Fish farming has been marketed for decades as the sustainable answer to overfishing. But the investigation found that the feed behind much of modern aquaculture is driving ocean depletion, labor abuse, and unrest far beyond what most consumers have any reason to suspect. The core premise of the industry's defense — grow more fish, catch fewer — turns out to be circular and self-defeating in ways that even its most ardent advocates have struggled to explain away.
The amount of fish people eat has doubled over the past 60 years. Aquaculture now supplies more than half of all the seafood people eat, but farmed fish are fed smaller fish caught in the ocean, creating substantial demand for wild fish. In other words, the very industry meant to relieve pressure on the world's oceans is extracting enormous quantities of wild fish from those same oceans just to fuel its own growth.
As of 2022, farm-raised seafood accounted for more than half of all seafood eaten worldwide, celebrated as a method to meet growing dietary demands while easing pressure on collapsing ocean ecosystems. But a sweeping investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project has revealed that aquaculture's core practice — relying on "fishmeal" made from wild-caught fish — is worsening ocean depletion, driving forced labor, and sparking violent civil unrest across multiple continents.
Fishmeal: The Hidden Engine of Global Aquaculture
The most popular types of farmed seafood — salmon, shrimp, trout, seabass, seabream — are fed "fishmeal," a protein-rich powder or pellet made from the very kinds of wild fish that aquaculture is thought to save. This is the central irony that the industry's marketing has worked overtime to obscure. The farmed salmon on your plate didn't grow in some pristine fjord eating natural food. It was fattened on pulverized wild fish hauled out of the ocean by fleets operating in some of the world's most vulnerable and exploited fishing communities.
Two-thirds of global aquaculture grows species that are fed fish meal and fish oil, ingredients made by cooking and pulverizing wild-caught fish. The scale of this operation is staggering. According to Urbina's reporting, "a fifth of all fish pulled from the world's oceans is now put to uses other than human consumption — mostly to make fishmeal and fish oil." That means one in five fish yanked from the sea never comes close to anyone's dinner table — it gets ground up and fed to another fish so that fish can eventually make it to yours.
The Feed Conversion Problem Nobody Talks About
Before they reach market, some farm-raised salmon eat more than six times their weight in wild-caught fish. Think about that arithmetic the next time someone tells you farmed salmon is a responsible choice. A 2024 Science Advances review found that about 87 percent of global fishmeal goes to aquaculture, compared with roughly seven percent to pigs and about five percent to poultry. Aquaculture doesn't just use fishmeal — it dominates the entire global supply of it, outpacing every other sector of animal agriculture combined.
Five of the world's largest salmon companies increased their use of fishmeal and fish oil made from whole wild fish by as much as 39 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to a report from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative. This happened in the middle of a period when the industry was loudly broadcasting its commitments to sustainability. The numbers tell a different story.
The Industry's Growing Appetite
Supporters of industrialized aquaculture say that we need more protein to feed the world. But the dirty little secret of farmed fish is that they need more wild fish to eat than the fish they produce. This negative feed conversion ratio — in which the raw material outweighs the end product — makes industrial carnivorous fish farming not just environmentally questionable but fundamentally inefficient as a protein-production strategy. Those wild fish are being taken from areas of the world where people are dependent on that source of food for their survival. The sad reality is that ramping up carnivorous fish farm operations makes world food security worse, not better.
Forced Labor: The Human Cost Hidden in the Supply Chain
The environmental ledger alone would be damning enough. But The Outlaw Ocean Project's investigation doesn't stop at ecosystem damage. It maps a parallel human toll — one that falls almost exclusively on poor and politically marginalized communities in the developing world, many of whom will never once eat the expensive farmed salmon their exploitation helps produce.
The business of fishmeal — often out of public view — can involve using forced labor, poisoning communities, and eradicating the livelihoods of local fishermen. Fishmeal production has led to chronic chemical exposure, violent protests — typically spurred by the stench from fishmeal factories — and escalating transnational tensions as countries compete for catch. That price is paid primarily by the poorer countries where the main ingredient of fishmeal is harvested and processed.
The investigation also documents political instability tied to the fishmeal industry, including 80 incidents of civil unrest — most commonly in the form of labor strikes and community protests tied to the industry, with many of them taking place in India, Peru, and Senegal.
Senegal: When Fishmeal Factories Erase a Way of Life
Nowhere is the human cost more acute — or more vividly documented — than Senegal. Here, the arrival of foreign-financed fishmeal processing operations has hollowed out artisanal fishing communities that have harvested the Atlantic for generations. In Senegal, fishmeal has put local fishers out of work, so increasingly they are selling — or repurposing — their boats to flee to Europe, typically taking the roughly 930-mile sea journey to Spain's Canary Islands, a route that claimed more than 3,000 lives in 2025. The grim math is inescapable: the global appetite for farmed salmon is, in a measurable and traceable way, contributing to one of the deadliest migration routes in the world.
This isn't a rhetorical flourish. The boats these fishermen once used to provide protein to their families and communities are being repurposed as vessels of desperation. The fish that once fed local Senegalese are now being ground into feed pellets for salmon that end up in American and European grocery stores — a transfer of nutritional and economic wealth that flows entirely in one direction.
China's "Blue Miracle" Built on Repression
The investigation's most geopolitically explosive findings involve China, the world's dominant force in global aquaculture. China now raises more than four times the amount of fish it catches. One of the fastest-growing regions in this boom is China's mountainous and desert inland west, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions known for intense political repression.
As the largest producer, consumer, and exporter of seafood worldwide, China is a major part of the problem. Ian Urbina pointed to China's expansion of aquaculture operations in landlocked areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, which he called "among the most repressive regions in China," as a cause for concern.
The reporting also mapped how Xinjiang's state-owned paramilitary group is involved in running fish farms, and how seafood produced by forced labor is reaching the U.S., in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The mechanism is both brazen and difficult to trace without dedicated investigative effort. Aquaculture from Xinjiang has been imported into the U.S. in recent years and distributed to grocery stores, military bases, public schools, and even U.S. congressional cafeterias, according to Bait to Plate, an online tool created by The Outlaw Ocean Project that tracks the fishing and seafood industries.
In August 2026, Tianyun was added to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The company was suspected of sourcing salmon from Xinjiang and participating in government-sponsored "recruitment and labor transfer programs to recruit, transfer, and receive Uyghur, Kazakh, and/or Kyrgyz persons" out of Xinjiang, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Earlier Outlaw Ocean investigations documented debt bondage, passport confiscation, avoidable deaths, fatal beatings, trafficked workers, illegal fishing, and a state-coordinated program forcing thousands of workers from Xinjiang and North Korea into seafood processing factories. The new investigation builds on that foundation, extending the documentation into the aquaculture sector proper.
What's Actually in Farmed Fish — and Why It Matters for Your Health
Beyond the geopolitical and environmental dimensions, the investigation surfaces a set of concerns that are disturbingly personal: what exactly is in the fish you're eating, and what is it doing to your body?
Antibiotics and the Resistance Crisis
Aquacultural practices endanger human health in direct ways. Fish farms frequently use antibiotics to control disease in their crowded pens. The conditions in intensive fish farms — high stocking densities, elevated waste concentrations, poor water circulation — create exactly the kind of environment where disease spreads rapidly and prophylactic antibiotic use becomes standard operating procedure rather than a last resort.
By eating fish that have been treated with antibiotics, consumers may be ingesting harmful levels of antibiotic residues. More importantly, the use of antibiotics in aquaculture increases the risk of harmful bacteria becoming resistant to specific antibiotics, undermining the effectiveness of those antibiotics in treating human illness. Finally, antibiotics used in aquaculture often enter the environment, where they contaminate wild seafood.
Because of their unique chemical structure, antibiotics are difficult to break down or degrade in the natural environment and can easily circulate in the food chain and accumulate in the human body. The rapidly increasing number of antibiotic resistance genes found in aquaculture environments is one of the major public health problems associated with the use of antibiotics.
With increasing frequency, provincial Chinese agricultural departments have found illegal levels of drugs in Chinese farmed fish, such as antibiotics at levels that threaten humans and dangerous use of sedatives, such as diazepam, to calm fish during transport. This is not a theoretical risk or a worst-case projection — it is a documented pattern emerging from within the regulatory systems of the country that produces the largest share of the world's farmed seafood.
Greenwashing at Scale
Third-party certification programs have become the primary tool through which the aquaculture industry manages its public image. Seals like "Best Aquaculture Practices" from the Global Seafood Alliance appear prominently on packaging at major American retailers, creating the impression of meaningful oversight. But the investigation found significant gaps between what those labels promise and what the supply chains actually deliver. The certifiers are frequently auditing facilities that source their fishmeal inputs from operations far outside the scope of any third-party review — meaning the stamp on the package can accurately describe the farm while saying nothing truthful about the full chain of production behind it.
The Ecological Fallout
The environmental damage radiates outward from fishmeal operations in multiple directions. The costs include the loss of artisanal fishing jobs, chronic chemical exposure, avoidable worker deaths, violent protests typically spurred by the horrid stench from fish meal factories, and escalating geopolitical tensions as countries compete for scarce sources of protein.
Marine ecosystems are being turned into dead zones from immense amounts of fish feces and excess feed in and around intensive fish farm operations. Open-net pen aquaculture — the dominant model for Atlantic salmon farming — deposits waste directly into surrounding waters, affecting seabed organisms, altering local marine chemistry, and, in some cases, generating parasite blooms that spread to wild fish populations.
America's Domestic Fishmeal Industry
It would be tempting to assume this problem is entirely offshore, that American consumers are simply importing someone else's bad decisions. But the infrastructure exists here too. At least 16 factories processed fishmeal in the United States as of 2025, along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, the Gulf Coast in Mississippi and Louisiana, and in California, Oregon, and Alaska. Most of these factories use inedible offcuts from fishing because nearly every U.S. state has outlawed the targeting of whole fish for fishmeal. The factories also tend to be better regulated than plants elsewhere in the world.
That domestic regulatory framework is genuinely better — but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. Trimmings alone cannot come close to fulfilling the industry's growing demand for feed protein, and other feed sources have proven tough to find. What domestic best practices can't do is substitute for the enormous volumes of imported fishmeal that American aquaculture operations still depend upon — fishmeal whose origins trace back to exactly the kinds of operations the investigation documents.
The Dead Ends of Innovation
Researchers have identified various potential alternative foods for carnivorous farmed fish — including seaweed, cassava waste, soldier fly larvae, single-cell proteins produced by fungi and bacteria, and even sewage. None are being produced affordably at scale, however. This is a critical point that gets lost in media coverage of aquaculture innovation, which tends to report optimistically on pilot programs and emerging technologies without adequately conveying how far those technologies are from being able to replace the current system.
Insect farming has emerged as a promising avenue for sustainable aquaculture feed production, offering a reliable supply through controlled environment farming. However, the sector encounters substantial challenges such as scaling up production, automating processes, refining processing techniques, ensuring food safety and biosecurity, and navigating intricate market regulations. The gap between "promising" and "operational at global scale" is measured in years, possibly decades — and the farmed fish industry is not standing still while it waits.
Focusing specifically on the United States, regulatory inefficiencies and complex permitting processes pose significant barriers to marine aquaculture. Despite recent recommendations to ease these obstacles for prospective shellfish farmers, two critical issues remain unresolved. First, many states have yet to adopt recommended improvements to their permitting frameworks, thereby perpetuating regulatory costs for shellfish growers. Second, the federal permitting system overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers faces legal challenges, leading to delays and uncertainty within the shellfish industry. These regulatory tangles make it harder to develop the genuinely sustainable aquaculture operations that could eventually provide alternatives — while the problematic ones keep operating.
The Congressional Reckoning
The Outlaw Ocean Project's investigation has already penetrated official Washington in significant ways. The nonprofit was the creator of a bombshell report on forced and Uyghur labor in the U.S. seafood supply chain that directly resulted in companies cutting ties with Chinese processors and several U.S. Congressional hearings into China's ties to forced labor.
The reporting sparked several Congressional hearings into China's ties to forced labor and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and U.S. lawmakers renewed their push to crack down on foreign IUU fishing. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China called on Congress to strengthen enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act — legislation meant to prevent importation of goods tainted by Uyghur forced labor in China — and do more to prevent seafood touched by forced labor in China from reaching U.S. markets.
Ian Urbina's congressional testimony has added weight to legislative efforts that were already underway, and the new investigation's "Bait to Plate" tracking tool — which maps thousands of ships, processing plants, retailers, and importers — gives lawmakers and regulators a level of supply chain transparency that did not previously exist in accessible form. Whether Congress acts meaningfully on that transparency is a separate question, one that will depend largely on whether public pressure builds enough to make inaction politically costly.
What the Modern Man Should Know Before He Buys
The investigation doesn't argue that all farmed fish is beyond redemption, or that aquaculture itself must be abolished. It argues that the industry's current trajectory — scaling up carnivorous species farming on a foundation of wild-caught fishmeal, sourced through opaque supply chains that include labor exploitation and chemical contamination — is neither sustainable nor ethical, and that the certification systems consumers rely on to navigate these choices are not adequate to the task.
For American men who care about what they put in their bodies — and increasingly, many do — the practical takeaways are worth understanding. Farmed shellfish like oysters, mussels, and clams represent a genuinely different category: they filter-feed, require no fishmeal, and can actually improve water quality in their local environments. Wild-caught fish from well-managed domestic fisheries carries a different risk profile than open-net farmed salmon of uncertain origin. And the country of origin on a seafood label — when it's even present — matters enormously, given the documented differences in regulatory standards between producers.
A wide-reaching investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project found that the aquaculture industry's answer to worries about the world's oceans — "grow more fish so we can catch less" — is often making the very problem it hoped to solve worse and harming the people it was meant to help. That is a conclusion worth sitting with. The food system promised men a cleaner, more responsible way to eat protein-rich fish without guilt. What the investigation reveals, five years in the making and across more than 70 reporters' work, is that the guilt was merely relocated — offshored to fishing communities in Senegal, to minority laborers in Xinjiang, to coastal ecosystems in Chile and India and Peru — and hidden behind a sustainability label designed to make American consumers feel good about a transaction whose true costs they were never supposed to see.
The question now is whether those costs, once visible, will finally be priced in.
