The best way to avoid eating chicken fed salmon is to buy Irish salmon, a food expert has suggested. 

Amid surging prices for traditional protein pellets, salmon farmers across Europe have taken to feeding their fish the innards of chickens. 

It is a far cry from what salmon traditionally eat as wild animals, where they typically live on a diet of zooplankton and microscopic animals, supplemented sometimes by the eggs of other fish. 

On The Claire Byrne Show, food writer Dr Michelle Carmody said the news is a “microcosm of a lot of the problems in the food system”. 

“We could start looking at the welfare of the fish and the chicken,” she said. 

“What sort of life or processing has the chicken had before it becomes a fish meal? 

“Also, then the welfare of ourselves, our bodies, how it affects us, the welfare of the environment.” 

A migrating salmon. Picture by: Alamy.com.

Irish salmon farmers have indicated that they have no plans to rear their fish on chicken. 

Which means anyone looking to avoid eating chicken reared salmon should consider buying Irish salmon, given food labels rarely offer an insight into an animal’s diet. 

“What an animal eats or what has been put into an animal before we eat it isn't very visible,” Dr Carmody said. 

“On an awful lot of food packaging, the ingredients aren't the whole story about food and how the food is created, where that food comes from.

“But in Ireland, it looks like 90% of our farm fish is actually farmed organically.”

Wild salmon 

While salmon has long been an integral part of Irish mythology, their numbers have plummeted some 90% in just 50 years. 

They are officially Red Listed as a species, which means they are at risk of extinction. 

“We kind of don't really notice it because there's so much salmon still on our shop shelves,” Dr Carmody said. 

“We don't really notice that the original kind of salmon that we had here in Ireland is getting less and less.”

Main image: A split of hens and a salmon. Pictures by: Alamy.com.