Debate on wild Salmon - read this article

Here is an interesting article that talks in some depth about the safety of eating the salmon that we traditionally treasure.

Is it OK to eat farmed salmon? If the answer seems elusive, it’s partly because things change—ecosystems change, the fishing and aquaculture industries change (or not), and we learn more about how those industries affect fish populations, ecology and economies. But the answer is slippery mainly because it depends so heavily on what the meaning of the word “OK” is. OK is personal. The most satisfying answer comes from what you might call your own Is-That-Food-OK Algorithm—a weighting of variables that will be as simple or complex as the criteria you bring to it.
The fry spends a year or so in freshwater tanks gradually made salty. Then your fish, some 8 to 10 inches long, is vaccinated against an array of infectious diseases, which are a constant threat in the crowded net pen into which the fish is now placed. The pen—a bowl-shaped net, essentially, with its rim at sea level—is about 30 to 100 meters across. It holds tens of thousands of fish. Instead of roaming the seas and swimming hundreds of miles to spawn, these fish never travel more than a few yards. Here in its pen your salmon fattens up on fish pellets. The pellets contain fish meal, fish oil, perhaps grains, and invariably an additive to pinken the fish’s flesh—usually astaxanthin, a carotenoid derived from commercially grown red yeast or algae. Given bountiful food and little work, your fish grows apace. When it’s a couple of years old and a couple of feet long and weighs 8 or 10 pounds it is netted, killed and packaged, iced and shipped.
Farmed salmon hold about 2 to 10 times the levels of PCBs, DDT, dioxins, pesticides, mercury and other suspected carcinogens that most wild salmon do, apparently because the rich meal they eat contains bits of oily fish in which these contaminants tend to concentrate. Yet the levels of those chemicals are still so low, as Harvard Medical School nutrition specialist George Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., noted in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “that it’s not going to cause harm.”