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Salmon Wars

The Dark Underbelly of Our Favorite Fish

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Salmon Wars

By: Catherine Collins, Douglas Frantz
Narrated by: Amy McFadden
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About this listen

"After listening to Amy McFadden's narration of this exposé, salmon croquettes may never taste the same. McFadden uses a podcaster- style of storytelling, friendly and righteous, to animate the history of farmed salmon's calculated rise to prominence."- AudioFile

A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told.


A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different.

In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring listeners to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet. The authors reveal the conditions inside hatcheries, where young salmon are treated like garbage, and at the farms that threaten our fragile coasts. They draw colorful portraits of characters, such as the big salmon farmer who poisoned his own backyard, the fly-fishing activist who risked everything to ban salmon farms in Puget Sound, and the American researcher driven out of Norway for raising the alarm about dangerous contaminants in the fish. Frantz and Collins document how the industrialization of Atlantic salmon threatens this keystone species, endangers our health and environment, and lines the pockets of our generation's version of Big Tobacco. And they show how it doesn't need to be this way.

Just as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation forced a reckoning with the Big Mac, the vivid stories, scientific research, and high-stakes finance at the heart of Salmon Wars will inspire listeners to make choices that protect our health and our planet.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

©2022 Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz (P)2022 Macmillan Audio
Business & Careers Ecosystems & Habitats Hygiene & Healthy Living War

Critic Reviews

Salmon Wars is a deep dive into the damage caused by current fish-farming methods to ocean environments, wild fish and their habitats, and the farmed fish themselves. It is also an account of the dismal failure of governments to stop such practices. Salmon farming needs reform. Until it gets it, read this book, and you will never eat farmed salmon again.”—Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, emerita, at New York University and author of What to Eat

“From cigarettes being tossed in a salmon pen to dark murky waters filled with litter, this is how America’s favorite fish are being ‘cared for.’ Salmon Wars will open your eyes to cruelty that parallels puppy mills and all the things we, as Americans, stand against. Frantz and Collins have delivered a book that you will not put down—bravo!”—Allen Ricca, author of Catching Hell: The Insider Story of Seafood from Ocean to Plate

“A vital act of reclamation.”—The New York Times

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.