I found this an interesting read, especially regarding the apparently menial difference in nutritional benefits from wild vs. farmed salmon.
I don’t have steady access to wild salmon, and the price can be forbidding, but our local fishmonger has Norwegian farmed salmon that is pretty fantastic.
I think alot of the backlash against farmed salmon is due to environmental concerns, and less so health or nutritional aspects of farmed salmon – although there are not insignificant differences nutritionally between farmed and wild.
For me, I choose wild over farmed because of taste and texture. Farmed (to me) is just bland and the flesh feels “soggy” and loose.
Of course, there’s farmed salmon and then there’s farmed salmon. Some farmed salmon is environmentally sustainable and the fish are not fed (for lack of a better word) their own kind (i.e. fish meal).
Wild is what salmon should taste like. To me anyways.
I guess it depends on your source. I’m quite happy with the quality of the farm-raised Norwegian salmon I get - both in texture and flavor, and I’ve been disappointed with wild sockeye and coho 
This is what we get monthly in my fish subscription:
It’s the 1lb. size. I think it has a good salmon flavor and that the texture avoids being flabby. The bellies make great sashimi!
I’ve had 3 bad experiences in the past 5 years with wild sockeye salmon in Ontario,fish that is brought in from British Columbia.
I go out of my way to seek out wild salmon when I’m out west in BC or the Prairies. I think Ontario must just be too far away for it to stay as fresh as it should be.
I buy the Faroe Island or Scottish farmed Atlantic salmon when I can. It seems to taste better than the cheaper Canadian or Chilean Atlantic salmon that’s available here.
Me too. However it has been many years since I have had farmed so there may be some better out there I don’t know about.
Some farmed is much much better than others. Some farms are more eco-conscious, as well.
Farmed Faroe Atlantic Salmon is a thousand times better than slightly unfresh wild sockeye. 
Yea, for sure.
Good farmed salmon is preferable to bad wild.
I will say, though, that if a person has grown up eating nothing but farmed, that person will not like wild salmon the first time trying it. Compared to most farmed varieties, wild salmon is much leaner and has a much stronger “salmon-y” taste.
I don’t know which I tried first. Probably Atlantic salmon that was farmed.
I know that when I have fresh wild salmon in BC, it’s been amazing. I like both, as long as they’re extremely fresh. I used to try to buy wild salmon over farmed in Ontario until I realized the premium farmed was tasting fresher.
It’s all these things and more. The biggest concern I have about salmon aquaculture is the mixture and potential loss of the natural genetic diversity. Farmed GMO fish do escape in large enough numbers to harm native runs.
Just because farmed fish now generally resemble wild to the eye isn’t any indicator that they’re nutritionally the same. People forget that there is a lot of variance between different species, different runs, and genetics within the same run on the same river.
Sadly, unless something dramatic is done soon, the wild fisheries will wither even further, and orcas will be devastated along with the fleets and industry. The filthy little secret here is that the rubber dust from all our cars is flowing untreated into the spawning streams and coastal waterways.
It’s not just farmed fish, but human consumption of all marine life, farmed, wild and everything in between.
Well, we’re top of the food chain. Will we remain the most powerful parasite on earth?
Only the future will tell.
Thank you for the gift link!
We love salmon but like you mention, the price for wild caught keeps me from buying as often as I used to.
I read something years ago that pinned Northern EU as among the least contaminated for farmed, Western EU as one of the worst (along with - very dim memory here - I think S.American farmed), with US farmed not as good as Northern EU but not as bad as some others.
Agree on the taste/texture aspects. If wild caught was even just 1.4X the cost of farmed, I’d probably stick with it.
Also, I think the wild freezes/thaws with less degradation. It used to be (as recently as about 4-5 years ago) that the local chains would have wild caught for 2-3 weeks at $9/lb. I’d load up a bit, we’d eat a bunch during the period, and then I’d freeze some.
Seafood Watch’s recommendations for farmed salmon are all over the place! One “best choice”, a few “good alternatives”, and whole truckload of “avoids”.
I like the quality of the Norwegian farmed salmon we get so much I’ve turned it into tartare, carpaccio, and gravlax.
Can anyone be surprised? These GMO fish spend their life cycle in crowded pens, sharing/breathing the same water (raining feces on each other), exchanging parasites, eating industrially prepared feed pellets with pigments and God Knows What Else in them. Get the picture?
And we buy them because… why? They’re cheaper.
I don’t buy them . Whats said above . Also they will never swim up river to spawn .
There are fish farms that are more sustainable, with proper water exhange.
The Mediterranean countries have had fish farming for very long time. I would think other countries have, as well.
Fish farming is a good way to feed people, even if there can be downsides.
Oh, please. The water exchange is never close to that of a natural run covering thousands of miles over years. Even if the farmed fish can breathe, there is a plume of waste from them that is wholly unnatural.
Pre-contact Hawai’i had aquaculture, too. But it was native fish, and never pellagic.
No one is starving for lack of wild salmon. You might as well argue that the downsides of nuclear waste are minimal.
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