The Most Toxic Food in the World?

The Most Toxic Food in the World?

Bricks and Mortars

Lawrence Reichard

            Fredrikstad, Norway - Kurt Oddekalv is big, burly, and brusque.  Oddekalv founded the Green Warriors, a Norwegian environmental group that has for 25 years been the bane of Norway's fish farm industry.  "I've been fighting them for 30 years," Oddekalv said as we drove through a rough, windswept North Atlantic landscape to see a sea-based salmon farm in Rong, Norway, about an hour northwest of Bergen, Norway's second-biggest city.

            "They fooled me for the first five years, but not since" Oddekalv said with a wry smile.  Oddekalv fielded several calls as we rode.  It was a busy day.  Oddekalv had just learned that the fish- farm industry was again using a chemical it had agreed, in writing, to stop using after a relentless campaign spearheaded by Oddekalv. 

            At Rong we boarded a small boat and rode in cold, driving rain past a breakwater to the three-pen operation.  It's hard to believe the pens hold 100,000 fish each.  In Belfast, Nordic would produce 33,000,000 pounds of salmon a year.  At eight pounds per fish, that's 4,125,000 fish - 41 of the Rong pens.

            At the operation's small visitor center there are vials representing what makes up the fishmeal, and it's heavy on Brazilian soybeans.  Seventy percent is the industry average.  Oddekalv says the soy is laced with the insecticide Diflubenzuron, a carcinogen that kills crustaceans, and he cited a German study that found the chemical in breast milk four hours after consumption of farm salmon. 

            According to Oddekalv, the European Union allows 10 times more mercury in salmon than in chicken, on the basis of lower salmon consumption and because of Norwegian pressure.  Oddekalv and American Dr, Claudette Bethune, formerly of the Norwegian public health ministry, have cited high levels of cadmium, another carcinogen, in farm fish. 

            Back in his Bergen office, Oddekalv tells me the pesticides are bad enough, but the real problem  is ethoxyquin, a Monsanto-invented fire retardant fed to the small forage fish that make up fishmeal to reduce fire risk in transit.  As the forage fish move up the food chain their toxins concentrate, and the toxins metabolize slowly in farm salmon, which are even fattier than wild salmon.  "You take all of that together, and you have the most toxic food in the world," Oddekalv said.

            Two days later I visited Professor Are Nyland in the cramped University of Bergen office he has occupied for 30 years.  Bergen's seemingly endless rain pelted his office window.  Nyland said heavy fish concentrations in fish farms, on-land and sea-based, make them fertile ground for extremely rapid spread of disease.  "It can happen in four hours, and the whole stock is lost," Nyland said.  He went on to say insects can get in to land-based fish farms and carry with them minute plastic particles bearing hormones that disrupt fish hormones.  

            "You want these things well away from populations," Nyland said.  "You don't want them near recreational areas," he said.  I told him Nordic Aquafarms wanted to clearcut and pave over 40 acres of woods and destroy a popular hiking trail.  He smiled.  "Well then I would be against it," he said. 

            From Bergen I traveled to Fredrikstad, where Nordic Aquafarms is building a land-based salmon operation in an existing industrial park that was decades ago foisted on a working-class neighborhood by what Norwegian journalist Haakon Strang, a plant neighbor, calls a corrupt local government. 

            According to Strang, construction of the Nordic facility was to finish in 2016, but construction was delayed when the facility's sheer weight caused it to sink into the ground.  Strang said Nordic should have anticipated the problem.  An email to Heim on this was not answered by press time. 

            By production levels, Nordic's Belfast plant would be more than five times bigger than Fredrikstad.

            Strang also told me Nordic illegally sent large numbers of trucks through his residential neighborhood late at night until residents complained.

            Having failed to reach Nordic CEO Erik Heim by phone, I tracked him down at his office across the street from the construction site.  I asked Heim whether he had read my last column on Nordic, in which I presented evidence that a large majority of Belfast and Waldo County residents oppose Nordic's Belfast plans.  Heim said, "No, but I read so many things." 

            This strains credulity.  Heim personally replied in print to my first Nordic column, his wife responded in print to my third Nordic column, and Heim had an August 27 Bangor Daily News op-ed that referred to an August 27 Bangor Daily News op-ed by me . 

            I asked Heim whether Nordic was still committed to staying out of communities where it was not wanted by the citizenry.  "In the end, we're going to have a permitting process, and people will have a chance to speak," Heim said.  In other words, no.      

            Heim said "it was impossible for bacteria to get out" of Nordic's planned system, and then later said such things are always possible.  This follows Nordic initially saying its operation wouldn't pollute and then saying it would pollute only a little.  And Nordic saying fish couldn't escape from its facility, and then saying it's "almost impossible."  And Nordic saying its Belfast discharge pipe would be 1.5 miles long, then one mile, then one kilometer (.62 miles).

            I asked Heim whether he suggested Deloitte, a global consulting firm, to Belfast City Manager Joe Slocum to write a $14,000 report on Nordic designed to placate opponents of Nordic's Belfast plans.

            "There is a whole range of consultants that do this kind of thing.  I gave Joe a list of companies that do this kind of work," Heim said.  That directly contradicts Slocum's assertions that he found Deloitte all by himself, before he ever spoke with Heim about it, and that there were few companies able to do such a report and thus it was no coincidence that he found one that had worked for Nordic.

            There is something seriously amiss here.  Perhaps Heim and Slocum should square their stories.

To see more previously published Bricks and Mortars columns, please go to:

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