Rebecca Stewart, owner of Spice Creek Café in Chico, lived on Vancouver Island for years. There, she operated a restaurant for a decade in the city of Victoria. She sold locally farmed salmon in the early days, but Stewart says dirty industry secrets emerged while the product’s quality visibly deteriorated, and she eventually became unwilling to buy it.

“Now they pack them into the cages like sardines and they feed them coloring and antibiotics,” said Stewart. “I would never feed someone that stuff.”

These days, others are catching on, too. Retail giant Target, for example, recently pulled farmed salmon from its shelves, though that gesture of environmental awareness may be more symbolic than effective. Target stores sold only 250 tons of farmed salmon in 2009, whereas farmed salmon exported to the United States from British Columbia alone totals more than 60,000 tons each year-80 percent of the province’s production. Chile and Norway are two other major suppliers of salmon for the United States market, and countless retailers and restaurants throughout America remain strong supporters of the controversial farmed-salmon industry.

Salmon farms, where parasites called sea lice breed in profuse densities and can smother juvenile wild salmon that pass close to the cages, have led to wild salmon extinction in British Columbia, Norway and other northern nations, according to many experts. On Vancouver Island, the epicenter of the West Coast’s 30-year-old farmed-salmon industry, the damage allegedly caused by open-ocean fish farms has been especially severe. Many streams in the region have seen rapid declines of their wild pink salmon runs since local farming operations began, and several runs have gone extinct.

The worst may still be coming, according to a December 2007 article in Science by Marty Krkosek, who concluded that by 2016 pink salmon will be entirely absent in the waters and rivers of the region’s Broughton Archipelago. Problems are just as serious on the mainland of British Columbia, where the once-mighty sockeye salmon runs of the Fraser River collapsed disastrously last year. Twenty million fish returned annually to the Fraser in recorded history, and while fisheries managers expected to see 10 million spawn in 2009, a record-low 1 million turned up. Biologists have said that salmon farms crowding the waters just north of the river’s mouth likely are at fault. Meanwhile, voices in the salmon-farming industry have denied responsibility.

Ultimately, though, Americans may be the culprits. We create almost insatiable demand for the product, usually treated heavily with chemicals and coloring, and wild salmon runs in regions near the farms are paying the price. Locally, Canadian farmed salmon appears at large grocery chains like Safeway and Costco. At the restaurant level, The Rawbar serves sashimi cuts of salmon farmed near Vancouver Island.