Hello everybody,
One of the problems with commercial denominations like "natural", aimed to catch consumers, is that they are basically misleading since they could not correspond to any standardized (or regulatory) meaning. The same other adjectives like "clean", "pure", "tasty" and so on. Even for expressions like "organic" or "biological" we could get more than one standard, which of them is the true one?
In the specific case of the European Union, I think it applies COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No 2065/2001. <<Article 4 1. The reference to the production method in accordance with Article 4(1)(b) of Regulation (EC) No 104/2000 shall consist of one of the following expressions, according to whether the product in question was caught, at sea or in freshwater, or resulted from aquaculture: … in English: ‘… caught …’ or ‘… caught in freshwater …’ or ‘… farmed …’ or ‘… cultivated …’, >>
This means the aquaculture salmon should be called (in the context of the European Union) “farmed” or “cultivated” (full stop). Anything else would likely to be marketing oriented(approved -through standards- or not).
My feeling is that most food regulators have avoided carefully the word “natural” (perhaps with the exception to differentiate from "synthetic", that is clealry opposite to "natural"). However, the antonyms of “natural” could be, for instance, “unnatural” or “abnormal”, but also “exceptional” (Answers.com). English is not my mother tongue, for this kind of subtly dialectic exercise, but I guess that if I were selling aquaculture fish, and forced to choose an adjective to contrast “natural”, I will choose “exceptional”. We are not yet at "Blade Runner" times, therefore "full synthetic salmon" does not exist (yet).
Of course this no the only possible non-sense; “biological” and “organic” fish are basically farmed fish; this means that we could finish with “unnatural organic” fish or “abnormal biological” fish. Well…
In think that there are very few "natural" foods around. Some of our more beloved foods have a very much "human" historical background than we could imagine. Wheat, for instance, is a defective plant, grains do not fall to the soil when mature, we choose it for that (even if we do not remember now), so to reproduce wheat need us (no need to arrive to GMO or flint-stone genetic seeds improvements with ionizing radiations of the 50’ and 60’, to find some “unnatural skeletons in the wardrobe”).
Wheat fields are shown very often as "natural" in publicity ads and very few people would realise they are not. Of course, wheat (and rice and cultivated seaweed) fields are beautiful to see, but the beauty we see there is no Nature, is the beauty of our civilization. Or as the Latin poet Publio Terencio wrote more than 2000 years ago: “Nothing human is strange to me”. We love Nature, but for most of our history as specie, we were also afraid of Nature (with very good reasons).
However, no problem, if oil prices continue to go up, in the near future there will be no need to call some fish “natural”, wild fish will be sold "naturally" in the jewelleries or at Sotheby auctions. Something similar, by the way, already happened in the Roman Empire.
Kind regards.
Hector M. Lupin
---------- Initial Header -----------
>From : owner-seafood@ucdavis.edu
To : seafood@ucdavis.edu
Cc :
Date : Fri, 9 Nov 2007 12:42:13 -0500
Subject : All Natural Farmed Salmon
> Can frozen farmed salmon with color added through the feed be considered all
> natural?
>
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> George Souza
>
> Endeavor Seafood, Inc.
>
> 172 Thames St., Suite 300
>
> Newport, RI 02840
>
> 401-841-5412 phone
>
> 401-841-8639 fax
>
> www.endeavorseafood.com
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Nov 12 2007 - 08:13:24 PST