Two-pound salmon sides slide through a conveyor belt, passing through several stations. At one, twenty needles inject Cajun-spiced marinade into the fish flesh before a worker channels the piece with a gloved hand toward another station to be filleted. Although the work is repetitive, it is not inhumanely fast-paced.

At another station, sides destined for supermarkets are routed through a deboning station. The machine extracts most of the pin bones—those little white bones that consumers find pesky—unwelcome evidence, perhaps, that they are eating, well, a fish. The distributor is able to invest in this expensive machine precisely because it processes so much of the same uniformed-sized species.

Some fillets are sliced just enough so that two halves can encircle a cylinder of stuffing and be sold as "ready to cook" individual portions. Four ounces of salmon (best cooked for no more than six minutes) plus four ounces of stuffing (requiring 25 minutes to cook). It's an odd pairing. If prepared as recommended, the fish is guaranteed to be overcooked. The yellowish mystery stuffing mix is extruded as logs through a giant tube. My hosts tell me this made-to-order combination is produced to their supermarket buyer's exact specifications year-in and year-out, and is their best-selling product.

Outside, in 93-degree heat, my mind turns to several paradoxes.

What does it say about us that more people process seafood than actively catch it?

Our current cultural predisposition to eat beneficial omega-3 fatty acids (even if we don't know how much we need or how much we are already consuming) has led to high demand for salmon—any salmon, even that which is farmed in ecologically destructive ways. Even if seafood distributors want to sell less farmed salmon, they are caught in a business cycle driven by consumer demand for a "healthy," inexpensive product. This cycle can be broken only with leadership from some part of the supply chain, but it is difficult to imagine leadership starting with the distributors in the middle. In addition, waste is everywhere—in the unwanted parts, during processing, over-ordering by retailers, and consumers' purchasing behavior. Large-scale delivery systems are surely part of the problem because they create an artificially large supply of inexpensive, low-quality food.

Lastly, the cost to our culinary heritage is substantial. The seafood processing industry isn't creating variety, and it controls most of the distribution channels. We are throwing away our chance to delight in other flavors and support ecosystem diversity at the same time. Shame on the nutritionistas for misleading us to accept such stale dishes and for creating a dependence on industrial-scale salmon farming. A comparable portion of lake trout with a small dollop of walnut pesto provides more omega-3s than farmed Atlantic salmon, not to mention far better flavor. We owe it to ourselves to demand more seafood variety from retailers—and I'm not referring to other stuffing mixes.

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