One day we had salmon for dinner and I remembered that my mom once said that she prefers to buy trout, which was caught in the see and is generally cheaper than salmon. I also remembered that somebody somewhere said that grown (in fish farms) fish is not healthy. I decided to do a little investigation on this. And this is what I found:

Pure Salmon Campaign

The Salmon Farm Monitor

Article in Science Daily

For a different point of view:

Salmon of the Americas (read everything in the ocean farming category)

It’s up to you which opinion about fish farming to hold, but I personally think that quantity of production is inversely proportional to the quality, healthiness and eco-friendliness of it. If you want to produce more than it is possible in the natural conditions, you have to use various chemicals which at the end do harm for all the living creatures.

Thinking of it, I remembered that in secondary school (I was between 12 and 14 years old) we were reading about intensive agriculture, that it is the answer to famine problem and poverty. I wonder if they still write that in school books. It might solve the famine problem, but it creates threat to eco-systems and personal health. And money stays in the hands of corporate owners. In other words, intensive agriculture does very little good, if any. Therefore I’m very happy that ecologic farming is regaining its positions again.

So here’s a little trick to find out what kind of farm chicken eggs come from. I don’t know if it works in other parts of the world, but it for sure works in EU. So, each egg has a stamp on it with a code. The first number, from 0 to 4, shows the conditions in which chickens are kept. After this goes country code, then farm code, etc. Here are the meanings of this mystical first number:

4 – chickens are kept in cages. Each chicken gets a little cage, so small that it cannot even turn around. The light is artificial only, with the help of it one week is turned into 10 days – therefore eggs are small, with a weak shell. Due to lack of movement and this unnatural regime chickens are very likely to catch diseases, so they are being fed with antibiotics and other medicine.

3 – living conditions are pretty much the same, just cages are bigger, and contain several chicken.

2 – chickens can see natural light!!!

1 – chickens live free.

0 – ecologic eggs. This means natural living conditions, natural food.

(I got this information from my teacher of food science in Vilnius College of Higher Education)

Be nice to chicken. Buy ecologic eggs.

Sadly, in Lithuanian supermarkets I’ve only seen eggs with 4 and 3. At least in Denmark I can buy as many ecologic eggs as I want to.

Oh, to make this post about hospitality industry, I wish there were restaurants that would serve food only from ecologic products. Now it seems that with every visit to a restaurant you get a little dose of poison – they have to make profit somehow, you know.

What goes around, comes around. | Ką pasėsi, tą ir pjausi. | Kaip pasiklosi, taip ir išmiegosi. | Kaip šauksi, taip ir atsilieps. | Nepjauk šakos, ant kurios pats sėdi. | Nespjauk į šulinį, iš kurio pats gersi. | Nemyžk prieš vėją. | Damn there‘s a lot Lithuanian sayings about cause and effect.