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What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation

How To Protect The Ocean

Release Date: 10/19/2026

What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation show art What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation

How To Protect The Ocean

More than half the seafood eaten on Earth now comes from fish farms, and most of those farmed fish are raised on fishmeal made from wild-caught fish. Maya Martin, deputy editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, joins Andrew Lewin to unpack Food for Feed, a five-year investigation that traced fishmeal from the ships that catch it, through the plants that grind it, to the farmed fish on your plate. Maya explains how forage fish like sardinella and anchoveta are pulled from waters off West Africa, Peru and Southeast Asia, often from stocks that are already overexploited and from communities that...

info_outline How to Read the Seafood Counter Like a Marine Biologist show art How to Read the Seafood Counter Like a Marine Biologist

How To Protect The Ocean

Picture a big sign over the seafood counter promising sustainable fishing, with a fish every independent guide says to avoid sitting on ice right below it. In most countries nobody broke a rule, because the word "sustainable" on seafood has no legal definition. In this final episode of our sustainable seafood week, Andrew Lewin walks you through how to see past that sign and choose seafood you can feel good about. You'll learn how to use the eco-labels and seafood guides that have already done the research for you, including the Marine Stewardship Council's blue tick for wild seafood, the...

info_outline Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where show art Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where

How To Protect The Ocean

Off the south coast of England, about 100 kilometres out, sits Haig Fras, a granite reef covered in jewel anemones and cup corals. For years it was protected on paper, yet heavy fishing gear could still drag across it. In March 2024, that finally changed. In this episode, Andrew Lewin explains why where we fish matters as much as how much we fish, and what it takes to turn a line on a map into real protection. Andrew breaks down the difference between midwater and bottom trawls and puts the damage shown in the recent Ocean documentary into context. Bottom trawling lands about a quarter of the...

info_outline The Trapdoor That Saves Sea Turtles From Shrimp Nets show art The Trapdoor That Saves Sea Turtles From Shrimp Nets

How To Protect The Ocean

A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the most endangered sea turtle on Earth, gets swept into a shrimp trawl. It hits a metal grid, slides out through a flap in the net, and swims away. That small trapdoor, the turtle excluder device, is one of the biggest success stories in fisheries management, and in late August 2026 a US federal appeals court upheld the rule extending it to skimmer trawl boats 40 feet and longer. In this episode, marine biologist Andrew Lewin walks through the bycatch fixes that are working and the fights still underway. You’ll hear why North Atlantic right whales get tangled...

info_outline The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing show art The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing

How To Protect The Ocean

Five centuries ago, explorers off Newfoundland described cod so plentiful that a weighted basket lowered into the sea came back full. By July 2, 1992, so few remained that Canada shut the northern cod fishery overnight. About 30,000 people lost their work in what became the largest single layoff in Canadian history. In this first episode of a week-long sustainable seafood series, Andrew tells the story of how the collapse happened and how slowly the cod came back. Andrew then breaks down the words that cause the most confusion in fisheries headlines: overfishing, overfished, depleted, and...

info_outline How to Choose Sustainable Seafood show art How to Choose Sustainable Seafood

How To Protect The Ocean

You want to eat seafood the right way. Then you hit the seafood counter and face a wall of labels, a sign promising “sustainable practices,” and an employee who has no idea where the tuna came from. Add documentaries like Seaspiracy telling you to quit fish entirely, and it’s tempting to give up and buy whatever looks good. Unsustainable fishing is the biggest threat to marine biodiversity, so those choices carry real weight. In this episode, Andrew’s good friend Dr. David Shiffman joins the show to talk about his new book, Why Sustainable Seafood Matters. David spent two years on the...

info_outline Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean show art Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean

How To Protect The Ocean

Blue whales can’t dodge ships. When scientists tracked blue whales alongside cargo ships off Southern California, the whales responded in just over half the encounters, and every response was the same: a slow, shallow dive. Not once did a whale move sideways out of the ship’s path. Models suggest ships kill around 18 blue whales a year off the U.S. West Coast, nearly eight times what the population can lose and still recover. The good news is in the data. Most blue whale strike deaths happen in a small slice of ocean, and that’s where ports, air quality agencies, marine sanctuaries, and...

info_outline When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear show art When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear

How To Protect The Ocean

In 2014, a patch of unusually warm water nicknamed "the blob" settled off the west coast of North America. The cold, food-rich water that normally stretches far offshore shrank into a narrow strip along the coast, and hungry humpback whales followed their food straight into the waters where Dungeness crabbers had set thousands of traps, each tied to a vertical rope. Entanglements jumped from about 10 a year to 53 in 2015 and 55 in 2016. In this episode, Andrew traces the line from warmer water to a specific whale in a specific rope. You'll learn why lunge-feeding whales depend on dense patches...

info_outline The Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute show art The Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute

How To Protect The Ocean

Fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face in. Your heart slows within seconds. That reflex lives in every whale in the ocean too, and in a blue whale it is pushed so far that the largest heart on Earth can drop to two beats a minute on a deep dive. In this episode, Andrew walks through the first heart rate recording from a wild blue whale, led by Jeremy Goldbogen's team at Stanford, and a study by Terrie Williams of UC Santa Cruz that tracked narwhals fleeing after release from nets in East Greenland. The narwhals swam as hard as they could while their hearts fell...

info_outline The Biggest Mouthful: How Blue Whales Eat and Why Krill Matters show art The Biggest Mouthful: How Blue Whales Eat and Why Krill Matters

How To Protect The Ocean

A blue whale can swallow a volume of water bigger than its own body in a single gulp. That move, called lunge feeding, is one of the most extreme feats in the animal kingdom, and it only pays off when krill is packed into thick, dense swarms. In a thin patch, a blue whale gets back about six times the energy it spent. In a dense swarm, it gets back more than 200 times. In this first episode of the Age of Giants series, Andrew breaks down how rorqual whales feed, then follows the krill. In 2025, the Antarctic krill fishery hit its 620,000 tonne precautionary limit for the first time and closed...

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More than half the seafood eaten on Earth now comes from fish farms, and most of those farmed fish are raised on fishmeal made from wild-caught fish. Maya Martin, deputy editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, joins Andrew Lewin to unpack Food for Feed, a five-year investigation that traced fishmeal from the ships that catch it, through the plants that grind it, to the farmed fish on your plate.

Maya explains how forage fish like sardinella and anchoveta are pulled from waters off West Africa, Peru and Southeast Asia, often from stocks that are already overexploited and from communities that depend on them for food and work. She walks through the stench and toxic waste that surround fishmeal plants, the protests they spark, the deaths and injuries of workers, the fire-retardant chemical ethoxyquin, and fish farms built in China's Xinjiang desert whose salmon has reached US institutions. She also shows how the team's Bait to Plate tool lets anyone follow a supply chain end to end, and why third-party certifications have missed many of these problems.

You'll leave knowing which seafood choices avoid the fishmeal problem, from filter-feeding shellfish to local catch you can see come in, and which organizations are pushing retailers and governments to clean up the supply chain. Content note: this episode discusses forced labour, violence, deaths at sea and migrant deaths. Explore the investigation at foodforfeed.theoutlawocean.com and baittoplate.theoutlawocean.com.

Links mentioned in this episode

Takeaways

  • More than half of the world's seafood comes from aquaculture, and more than two-thirds of farmed seafood depends on fishmeal and fish oil from wild fish
  • At least half of the species landed by fishmeal vessels assessed in the investigation are overexploited or worse
  • Roughly 90% of the catch used for fishmeal is edible for people, and in West Africa sardinella is a staple protein and a livelihood
  • More than 9.5 million people live within a mile of a fishmeal plant, and the investigation documented at least 80 incidents of civil unrest tied to the industry
  • Over half of more than 550 seafood companies making strong sustainability claims had documented crimes or concerns in their supply chains
  • Farmed shellfish like mussels, oysters and clams need no feed, which makes them a lower-impact choice
  • Your action: look up one farmed seafood product you buy on Bait to Plate and see where its feed came from