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Why Farmed Salmon Is Pink · The food files

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Why is farm salmon pink? That's our question today. Chances
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  Speaker 1: are you're imagining a rich, vibrant pink-orange right now when
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  Speaker 1: you think of a salmon fillet. It's so tied to
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  Speaker 1: the fish that we named a color after it, right?
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  Speaker 1: But here's something most people don't know. If farm salmon
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  Speaker 1: ate only standard fish feed, their flesh would actually be
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  Speaker 1: a pale grayish beige. To understand why, we have to
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  Speaker 1: start in the wild. Wild salmon don't produce pink pigment.
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  Speaker 1: They get it from what they eat. Out in the ocean,
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  Speaker 1: salmon feed on krill, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans, and other small
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  Speaker 1: creatures that have eaten microalgae. Those algae produce a red-orange
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  Speaker 1: pigment called astaxanthin. It travels up the food chain from
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  Speaker 1: algae to krill to salmon and gets stored in the
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  Speaker 1: salmon's muscle. It's the same family of pigments that turns
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  Speaker 1: flamingos pink and cooks shrimp red. Farmed salmon live a
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  Speaker 1: very different life. They're raised in pens and fed pellets
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  Speaker 1: made from ingredients like fish meal, fish oil, and plant proteins.
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  Speaker 1: Without the wild diet, there's little natural astaxanthin. So fish
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: farmers add it to the feed, either making it synthetically
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  Speaker 1: or derived from natural sources like algae or yeast. And
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  Speaker 1: here's where it gets interesting. Because the pigment comes from feed,
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  Speaker 1: farmers can influence how pink the fish becomes. The industry
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  Speaker 1: has even used color reference cards like paint swatches numbered
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  Speaker 1: by shade. Now, is this dangerous, though? Regulators allow astaxanthin
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  Speaker 1: in salmon feed within certain limits, and it's set at
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  Speaker 1: the limits as well. It's an antioxidant also found naturally
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  Speaker 1: in seafood. In the U.S., you may see color added
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  Speaker 1: on farmed salmon labels. It's an ordinary part of aquaculture,
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  Speaker 1: not a secret poison, but it does raise an interesting question.
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  Speaker 1: Why go to all the trouble? Well, the answer is
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  Speaker 1: simply psychology. We eat with our eyes first. Research on
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  Speaker 1: food perception consistently shows that color shapes what we expect
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  Speaker 1: the food to taste like, even how we rate its flavor.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: For salmon, deep color signals freshness, quality, and health. A
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  Speaker 1: pale fillet looks wrong. So consumers pass over the gray
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  Speaker 1: fish and buy the pink one, and producers respond by
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  Speaker 1: making every fillet look the way we expect salmon to look.
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  Speaker 1: In other words, farmed salmon isn't pink because the fish
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  Speaker 1: needs it. It's pink because we do. And that's a
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  Speaker 1: pattern you'll see again and again on this show. Many
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  Speaker 1: of the processes behind our food aren't about nutrition or
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  Speaker 1: safety at all. They're about meeting expectations we might not
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  Speaker 1: even know we had.