Me and the Progress Trap

This blog is corrupt but, before we get onto that, a word about mammoths.

Around 15,000 years ago, round about the end of the last ice age, your and my ancestors became much more proficient at hunting down these creatures who, let’s remember, were some 50 or 60 times heavier than them. By a combination of tools, cooperation with wolves and trapping, they progressed from killing the odd one to a couple, then four and finally running entire herds off suitable cliffs where the height was enough for the impact to mortally wound them. It may have fed them well at the time, but this advance soon led the mammoth up to, and then through, the gates of extinction. Soon, all that was left was a little remnant population on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia. This achievement is known as the ‘progress trap’. In other words, we become too clever for our own good.

The same could be said to apply to the Atlantic salmon. Once so common that it was illegal to feed your servants with the fish more than three or four times a week, they are now, as from December 2023, on the IUCN red list of endangered species, meaning that the species is now considered at risk of extinction. Causes range from warming seas, warming rivers, acidification ,pollution, forestry, hydro, dams, weirs, sheep dip, seals and ecosystem changes that we do not yet understand.

And yet, funny old thing, the decline of the Atlantic salmon mirrors almost exactly the ascent of the farmed salmon. The industry, and its cheerleader-in-chief (the Scottish Government), do everything in their power to disassociate the two lines from each other, and you may have your own views as well. I have mine, which are deep-rooted but now also informed by one month of my life spent researching the matter last summer (The Restless Coast; a Journey around the Edge of Britain; June 5 2025!) and my humble, layman’s view is that the two cannot possibly be unconnected. Challenge me with questions, by all means, but I am claiming that the Atlantic salmon will go the way of the mammoth sooner or later, victim of another Progress Trap. Stupid, clever humans.

We had not eaten salmon of any sort in this house for about 7 years, until Saturday just gone, when we stuffed ourselves with it. And it was delicious. And then we had it again in our scrambled eggs at breakfast. And it was superb. And we didn’t even feel guilty, so why the change of heart?

Well, this salmon was raised in a new way, on land, in Iceland, supported by renewable power that comes entirely from hydro, geothermal or wind. The water is filtered naturally through the porous lave bedrock below the farm, and the feed (they say) is from environmentally certified suppliers. I can’t vouch for any of that, as I haven’t seen it, but neither am I a hair-shirted puritanical Monbiot figure, waving my middle-class sensitivities into other people’s previously cheerful dining rooms. You see, I want this to work. I want it to be the answer. And I want to be able to eat salmon again. And I believe that, whilst almost certainly not perfect, it is probably a giant step on the journey back to guilt-free salmon consumption. Good luck to it.

And good luck to Britain’s beleaguered artisan food producers and retailers who take the risks to run with products like this. Suppliers like my friends Mark and Fiona at The Chesil Smokery (www.chesilsmokery.co.uk) who have committed that all their salmon will come from this source as soon as the production can supply enough. As it is, if you ask them to send you only salmon from Iceland, they will do that, possibly after a short pause.

We desperately need good, ethically sourced food, and we equally need to support artisan food businesses who have the courage to experiment.

And the corruption? The salmon came to me out of the blue and entirely free and you know what? It made it taste even better.

(I am making a valiant attempt to sort the analytics of this blog out. If you can bear to try to comment either on the blog itself, or on the media where you found it, that would be wonderful, especially if you let me know where you had problems.)