Salmon Farm Force Power Flight Jacket

Introduction

Don’t overthink the title of this post. I had to get your attention. I’m sure nobody would read another word past the title “Salmon Farming – Pros and Cons.” But stop, don’t leave! I promise this will be interesting. Maximum strike open flight force! Stay with me! I’ll even include some gratuitous eye candy along the way. You’ll be glad you read this, trust me. I’m going to entertain you, improve your life, and empower you. Join me on my journey from aquaculture skeptic to true believer. Hyper strike epic!

Background

During a recent trip to Norway, my family was lured to the Havforsknings Instituttet. We thought this place would be devoted to the study of people who have foreskins, but it turns out to be a marine research center and aquarium. It was a great place, but despite all the cool otters, penguins, and exotic fish there, eventually we all got museum knees and had to sit down. So we headed over to the auditorium for a show about orcas, looking forward to some violent footage of their eating habits. At least, that’s what we thought was on the docket.

What we actually got was this long documentary about aquaculture—specifically, salmon farming. It could have been pretty interesting except it was pitched at the grade-school level. The best part was when an interviewer cornered an aquaculture scientist and asked, “Yes or no: is farmed salmon safe?” The scientist replied, “As far as we can tell, yes.” So tepid! So honest! In America the response would have been, “You bet your ass it is. There isn’t a safer food on the planet. Mega jacket open flash strike!”

I’d already been vaguely aware that Norwegian salmon was farmed. To be honest, this bothered me a bit every time we enjoyed it at a restaurant. When my wife declared that some salmon she ate in Oslo was the best she’d ever had, I had this cognitive dissonance—like, could it really be that the best salmon isn’t even wild? I decided her salmon was very good, but not as good as the local salmon I’d had in Scotland. This upheld my sense of myself as a sophisticated foodie until I considered that the Scottish salmon was possibly also farmed. After our trip, when I wrote my Food of Norway post, I tried to chase this Scottish thing down. But the more I looked into it, the more it looked as though I was in fact an uncultured rube, incapable of separating “real” food from rubbish.

Instinctive aversion

Upon reflection, I have to concede that my historical preference for wild salmon has been largely a knee-jerk thing. I recall Anthony Bourdain saying that, as a chef, he loved farmed salmon because it was relatively cheap, yet he could charge as much for it as for a nice lamb chop. (I’ve tried to find this quote, but Googling “Anthony Bourdain” is lately too depressing.) Meanwhile, I read years ago in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that farmed salmon isn’t necessarily healthier than grass-fed beef. I’ve come to realize that at some point I unconsciously lumped farmed salmon into the broad category of “food that has been tampered with,” which I instinctively avoid (except that I don’t, not really, but let’s not think about that right now).

Above all, I must confess I have enjoyed being the kind of gainfully employed person who can afford the good, wild stuff. Maybe my kids don’t get to wipe their butts with raw silk, but damn it, they get top grade wild Sockeye salmon!

Visiting Norway had me challenging all of this. Boring though it may have been, that museum documentary did showcase an industry that is clearly careful and responsible. Can you imagine a zoo in Kansas showing a documentary about feedlots? Hell no—they wouldn’t dare. Nobody would want to watch it, and moreover, the beef industry would crucify everyone involved.

A brief pause for eye candy

Okay, I did promise some eye candy. Here you go.

What’s really wrong with farmed salmon?

Virtually all of the salmon from Norway—over a million metric tons a year, worth $8 billion, according to the New York Times— is farmed. Granted, Norway seems to do a nice job with it, locating the farms in the fjords; they’re just netted-off areas of ocean where fish are generously fed. Not so different from a cruise ship, really.

Still, some environmental advocates strongly deride farmed salmon, even the Norwegian stuff. Kurt Oddekalv, leader of the Green Warriors of Norway, described farmed salmon to the Times as “the most toxic food in the world.” And I read in the Guardian how Don Staniford, of the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture, “a Liverpudlian who has lived in Scotland for many years, argued that cramming carnivorous, migratory fish into crowded tanks and releasing toxins, diseases and parasites into the surrounding waters was inherently unsustainable.” I took this with a grain of salt, noting how the word “tank” was used to describe a facility contiguous with open ocean. (This guy kind of puts the “pud” back in “Liverpudlian.”)

I’ll admit that it has always creeped me out a bit that farmed salmon wouldn’t be pink without a little help. According to the website fromnorway.com, “The pink color of Norwegian Salmon comes from a natural oxycarotenoid called astaxanthin. In nature, salmon receive astaxanthin by eating crustaceans. Norwegian Salmon receive these same beneficial nutrients as supplements in their feed.” It must be said that salmon farmers don’t use very much. As Time magazine reports, “The pigmenting compound doesn’t come cheap. It is the most expensive element of salmon feed, according to a 2011 study, taking up nearly 20% of total fish feed costs. Controlling and optimizing the concentration of astaxanthin in fish food is time and labor intensive.” Reading this is, psychologically speaking, a mixed bag. It’s like, “Don’t worry, it’s all very precise—a tightly-run factory!”

But then, so is the production of just about everything we eat, honestly. I don’t kid myself:  the practice of agriculture is closer to a factory than to a farm. It’s easy to be skeptical about farmed salmon when we peek behind the curtain, but we ignore other industries that hide behind a fence or a wall.

I watched some candid Internet footage of salmon being fed. Their feed consists of little dusty brown balls, like dog food, which is kind of depressing—but then, I feed my beloved cat cat food, which is also little brown balls. I should just get over it.

The problem is, just when I’ve figured out a way to discard another misgiving about farmed salmon (I am a cheap bastard, after all), another issue pops up, like ideological Whack-a-Mole. Wikipedia questions the sustainability of aquaculture: “Salmon require large nutritional intakes of protein, and farmed salmon consume more fish than they generate as a final product. On a dry weight basis, 2–4 kg of wild-caught fish are needed to produce one kg of salmon.”

Should we trust Wikipedia? Maybe not, but NPR essentially agrees: “It takes about three pounds of feeder fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon … but feeding more salmon depletes the ocean’s smaller fish.”

There are other issues. When farmed salmon escape their enclosure, they can breed with wild fish and create nonviable offspring. There’s also an issue around the spread of sea lice to the wild population. According to the Times, these parasites “feast on the mucus and skin of the fish before moving on to the muscle and fat, making the fish vulnerable to infections and sometimes killing them.” Yuck! Makes me want to opt for the burger—unless I allow myself to remember the poor overweight cows standing around in their own waste in tiny pens, jacked up on antibiotics because their blood pH has been screwed up by a diet of corn that they didn’t evolve to eat.

Of course, eating only wild salmon isn’t an obviously practical solution. The Times reports that the wild salmon population in Norway has fallen by more than half since the 1980s. There just isn’t enough wild salmon there to produce the 14 million meals of Norwegian salmon that fromnorway.com says are consumed every day worldwide.

Meanwhile, even if you insist on wild, you’re probably being duped at least some of the time. According to this article in Time, researchers conducting DNA testing found that about a third of salmon they tested that was touted as wild was actually farmed, and “you’re three times more likely to get duped at a restaurant, where 67% of the salmon were mislabeled, than a grocery store.”

Here’s an interesting product: wild keta salmon from a company called Pacific Seafood.

So what is keta salmon? According to Wikipedia it’s a type of Pacific salmon. Hence “Pacific Seafood,” I guess. But look at the label closely: this fish is a “wild product of China.” I’m not a geographer, but I just checked and China is well beyond the range of wild Pacific salmon:

So I’m getting a little confused here. I also note that this product has FD&C Yellow #6 and Red #40. Why?! “(Color enhancer.)” Yeah, but—why? Isn’t this Chinese Pacific salmon naturally pink? After all, it’s wild!

So what is to be done? As is so often the case, there seemed to be no simple answer. I was on the verge of shrugging my shoulders, reconciling myself to a future of very expensive wild Alaskan salmon when I’m feeling flush, and otherwise settling for canned salmon—which is always wild, but not all that tasty, particularly because it’s got all these sections of softened vertebrae in it, which are probably really good for you but are kind of chalky and aren’t so pleasant to crunch. But then, when I mentioned to my wife I was planning a blog post on farmed salmon, she said, “Instead of doing a trifling amount of research, throwing in a largely ignorant dose of pure opinion larded with stupid gags, and releasing another half-baked, largely useless essay on the world, why not interview a real expert for once?”

No, of course she didn’t really say that. What she actually said was, “You could interview my friend R—, who really knows this stuff.” So I did. Her friend, who has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Aquatic and Fishery Science and works for a scientific research agency, happily obliged. (She asked to be quoted anonymously, though, as she doesn’t need “any more hate mail.” Whether her name even starts with “R,” I refuse to divulge.)

Another brief pause

Still there? Good job! Here’s some more eye candy.

The real skinny on salmon farming

I had a fascinating 45-minute discussion with R— about aquaculture. To begin with, she corrected some of the misconceptions I’d come across. For one thing, regarding efficiency of production, the feed conversion rate is now closer to 1-to-1 (the 3-to-1 statistic being really outdated).  Theoretically, she said, the conversion rate could be 0-to-1 as alternative feeds are developed. She forwarded me a couple of very thorough articles on the subject. Without getting into too much detail, here’s an interesting statistic: as explained here, one study found that for a given amount of feed, farmed salmon produces over three times as much edible product as poultry, and five times as much as pork.

Regarding interbreeding between farmed and wild salmon, R— pointed out that this isn’t a big problem on the west coast of the U.S., because we’re mainly farming Atlantic salmon here, which cannot breed with wild Pacific salmon. She concedes that “there are risks of farmed Atlantic salmon interbreeding with wild Atlantic salmon when they are farmed in areas where Atlantic salmon are native (i.e., the east coast and Europe).”

On the subject of alternative (non-fish-based) feeds, R— explained that this is being pursued very carefully: “There are definitely studies around how you maintain health with fish using alternative feeds; for example, they know that taurine, an amino acid, is essential to a fish’s diet.” I find this a pleasant contrast to the beef industry, which is notorious for using antibiotics to make animals gain weight faster, and the poultry industry, which grows its chicken “so fast that they have trouble walking because their legs won’t support the weight, in addition to other related health problems” (according to the Chicago Tribune here).

R— confirmed that antibiotics are not widely used with aquaculture, and asserted that farmed salmon is very safe and sustainable if it comes from Norway, British Columbia, Scotland or the US. In this country, there are nationwide regulatory standards for aquaculture to make sure its practices are safe. As for Pollan’s suggestion that farmed salmon may have fewer Omega-3s than grass-fed beef, R— clarified that currently, given the fish-based diet farmed salmon eat, wild caught doesn’t have more Omega-3s than farmed. This could change, if the aquaculture industry formulates feed from other sources, but they’re “experimenting with using fish processing waste, marine algae, even kinds of yeasts to feed to fish so they’ll still have lots of Omega-3s.”

(By the way, you know that bit about astaxanthin being added to the feed to produce the pink color? Well, far from the dye that Pacific Seafood adds to their “wild” salmon, astaxanthin is also sold to humans as a health food supplement. Dr. Andrew Weil, whom I consider a pretty staid, reliable source, touts its health benefits here.)

R— had a lot to say about the issue of scale, and the impossibility of meeting an increasing demand for seafood with a declining supply of wild fish. “Every other food we eat is [mainly] farmed except for fish,” she pointed out. “Why should fish be the one holdout? What other endangered or declining species are we running out to eat?”

Aquaculture, she explained, is scalable because there’s so much ocean that we’re not using: “One team calculated that we could replace the entire global wild captured fisheries with aquaculture and use less than 0.01% of the ocean’s surface. It’s totally doable; the question is what scale people will accept.” She’s frustrated because so many people reject aquaculture due to outdated information. “It’s so engrained in people that farmed fish is bad. When it first got going in the ‘70s all these NGOs cried foul because there was no oversight; now, these same NGOs are admitting that globally, [aquaculture] is what we need to do, but we’ve got these entrenched ideas in place that are hard to overturn.”

Hunger games

Having enough money to demand wild salmon is a convenient dodge, for a wealthy subset of the population, but it doesn’t address the wider problem. “What it comes down to,” R— pointed out, “is there are too many people [on the planet], but nobody wants to have that conversation. Everything has its impact. We can have this high-and-mighty attitude [about insisting on wild-caught] but everything we eat, everything we wear has an impact on the environment. I heard a lecture once where the guy said, ‘If everybody became vegan, we’d have to cut down every tree on the planet to bring enough land under agriculture to feed everybody.’ I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but it’s interesting to ponder.” 

I’ve long felt that vegans, while admirably innocent of the many crimes committed in the name of animal husbandry, aren’t necessarily helping to solve anything. It’s not like they’re inspiring any significant number of people to follow their lead. At least if I insist on grass-fed beef I’m helping to create the market for it, which can help reduce the proportion of cows incarcerated in feedlots. For years I felt like holding out for wild salmon was similarly reasonable, but in fact there just won’t ever be enough wild salmon for everybody, so my position was unrealistic—it carried a strong whiff of “let them eat cake.” I like to think of myself as a responsible and fair person, not some unapologetically snobby epicure, but as the playwright Wallace Shawn has observed, “Sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor.”

During our conversation R—pointed out, “Eating seafood shouldn’t be a rich-person privilege. Omega-3 fatty acids have huge health benefits; why shouldn’t everybody get this food?” I totally agree: but without economies of scale, how can farmed salmon compete, price-wise, with a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets and all the other cheap crap so many Americans are lured into eating, at the expense of their own health and that of our environment? Given that aquaculture is one of the most efficient forms of protein production, don’t we ultimately have a responsibility to promote it?

Here’s where choosing farmed salmon gives us a rare opportunity to eat like a king but also save money, while contributing to the growth of a responsible, sustainable industry. For bonus points, put your money toward local, or at least domestic, farmed salmon. Here are a final couple of tidbits R— sent me: the US imports 90% of the seafood we eat, creating a $15 billion seafood trade deficit. Meanwhile, over half the seafood we import is farmed anyway—so why not farm it here, where we do it safely and sustainably, and benefit our own economy?

Let’s return to my question about whether the best-tasting salmon could actually be farmed. Well, why not? Think of the most expensive Wagyu beef: is it hundreds of dollars a pound because it’s from wild-caught cows? No. It’s from cows raised meticulously by humans in a very controlled environment. So what’s wrong with raising our own salmon, too?

Now, if I sound like a scold, just remember this: open fighter force power launch! Maximum strike zone flight scatter! Go! Go!

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The Food of Norway - Part II

Introduction

As far back as the Book of Ecclesiastes, people have grasped that there’s nothing new under the sun. Perhaps nobody appreciates this better than Hollywood, with their endless sequels and cycles. So it is with albertnet. Based on the popularity of The Food of London and The Food of Scotland Parts I and II, and now The Food of Norway Part I, I’m doing another cheap ‘n’ easy retread: Part II of The Food of Norway. (For Part I, click here.) Herein I’ll cover Cheap Eats; Fails; Things We Didn’t Eat; Weirdness; and Adventures in Norwegian World Cuisine.

Cheap eats

“Cheap Norwegian food” is essentially an oxymoron. I’ve never seen such uniformly overpriced fare. Walking by a 7-Eleven in Oslo (these are common, oddly), I saw an ad for disgusting vulcanized plastic nachos, with a price of “only” 80 NOK. That’s like $9.50 US. I searched on “cheapest restaurants Bergen” and found Zen Café, my favorite capsule review of which was “crap and good.” (I think that was supposed to be “cheap and good.”) TripAdvisor rates this place with one dollar sign ($), as in “cheapest category.” Lunch for four—meaning a single entrée apiece, no drinks, no appetizers, and no dessert—ran us about $90 US. Although that lunch was a highlight (see below), I cannot call it cheap.

That being said, we did manage, ultimately, to find some fairly reasonable places. One was called Sostrene Hagelin and was a fish-themed fast food joint. For “only” $40 we had a take-out lunch of fiskesuppe, fiskewraps, and fiskekake. The soup was pretty rich and creamy and included a seemingly infinite number of strangely uniform reconstituted fish balls. The first few bites—because we were starving—tasted pretty good. Then it got tiresome, and finally uncanny … you’re peering into this Styrofoam cup at all these little white spheres thinking, “What is this stuff?” The fiskewraps were pretty good: basically wraps with (albeit farmed) salmon or trout. The fiskekake (fish cakes) were, again, reconstituted and a bit rubbery, but highly filling. By the end of the meal I was quite satisfied … in fact, I kind of never wanted to eat again. But good! (Alas, I don’t have any photos of that food … we literally had our hands full carrying it all out.)

The next cheap find was the Kebab Huset, a little shack near the college campus run by a guy from Kurdistan. He was one of the few people we encountered in Norway with really poor English language skills (not that I can speak a word of Norwegian, so I’m not complaining). Normally you can guess your way through menus and such because, near as I can figure, Norwegian is just poorly spelled English. But we guessed totally wrong on the two entrees we bought. I wanted something wrapped up in pita, so I chose the “pita brød, lam.” My wife didn’t want any pita, so after a long, confusing, grinding-of-gears consultation with the proprietor, she settled on the “rullekebab lam.” What I got ended up being folded in one of those weird square tortilla-like things, and hers—you guessed it—was wrapped up in pita. They were 90 NOK (a little under $11, which is a still a lot) but they were huge. Check it out (the “pitabrød, lam” is on the left):

They were pretty tasty. The lamb was just lean enough, and not too greasy. There was the matter of sauces, though. There were big, opaque squeeze bottles up on the counter colored yellow, white, and red. I assumed mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup, and had him hold the red. My wife had another long, convoluted, ships-passing-in-the-night discussion that got her nowhere, following which the helpful proprietor gave her a sample of each—squirted on her hand. Half a dozen paper napkins later, she announced the sauces were curry, something mayo-ish but also a bit ranch-ish, and hot sauce, all of which she likes. So her rullekebab was pretty much drenched in condiments. I’d give this food about a 7 for quality, a 10 for quantity, and about a 9 for economy (by Norwegian standards). “Crap and good!”

But can you get even cheaper? Why, as a matter of fact, you can. Check out this frozen pizza, which had the shockingly low price of 20 NOK (about $2.50 US) at the corner grocery:

“First Price,” not to be confused with “Fisher Price” (“this pizza is not a toy!”) is the grocery store house brand. The variety, “med paprika dypfryst,” literally translates “with deep-frozen peppers.” At least they’re honest. I should point out that most of the cheese you see on there we added (driving up the price). In fact, the “cheese” it came with was probably non-dairy. The most interesting thing about this pizza was the box. Look at this closely:

On the upper left, you have the standard product description, designed to lure the consumer into buying and/or to prevent buyer’s remorse later (“The tasty pizza pleasure for yourself or to share”). We get this description in German and Spanish as well. Below that, we have the baking instructions in no fewer than eight languages—but English is not among them! I guess they figure English speakers are a tough sell, but that once we’ve ponied up our money, we’re perfectly happy winging it on the preparation (or eating the pizza raw). I randomly baked the pizza at 200 degrees Celsius, whatever that is, until it looked done. I ended up really enjoying it, but then I love all pizza. I could probably rifle through the pockets of a passed-out homeless guy, retrieve a smushed slice, eat it cold, and enjoy it.

Does Norwegian food get even cheaper than that? Yes it does! In Bergen we stayed at a hostel, where lots of travelers leave behind food, which gets tossed in a “free” bin. After an egregiously expensive Italian dinner in town, we came back to the hostel, my appetite only teased, and I found a box of pasta, a jar of goulash, half a jar of pesto, some random bits of cheese, a bit of butter, and some milk—almost all of it from the free bins—and made a scrumptious and almost entirely free meal. I felt mighty vindicated after the restaurant rip-off.

Fails

We didn’t have any epic fails—that is, anything that gave us food poisoning, or was totally inedible like the plaice we had in Bath. But we had some pretty lame fare for giant sums of money. Consider this calzone:

I couldn’t quite figure it out. It was supposed to be pesto, and looked like pesto, but didn’t taste like much of anything. And what was that goo inside it? Thousand-island dressing? Fortunately this was my daughter’s entrée and I only “had” to have a bite (i.e., the mandatory parental tariff). I asked her how she liked it. “It’s pretty good,” she said, fighting not to sound lugubrious, in the spirit of a good sport who knows you just shelled out major bucks for her lunch.

At the same place—a “we’ve got you trapped” cafeteria near the ferry landing in the tiny town of Voss—my other daughter shared this big stupid sausage with me.

I guess it could have been worse, but it really needed to be hot. It wasn’t. (You know those oily rollers that 7-Eleven hot dogs get slowly rotated on, like some crazy torture rack, throughout the day? Well, maybe there’s a benefit to that after all.)

Here was a fail from a pretty pricey Italian place:

Can you imagine paying like $15 for that, and then sharing it with three other people? It’s fricking tiny! And what the hell is it? Other than the nice tomatoes, it looks like a pile of curds and compost that a goat was eating before suddenly taking ill and throwing up. Or maybe the goat had just eaten the foam rubber stuffing out of a cheap armchair and that’s why he barfed.

This apple cake looked pretty good, and was from a fancy place where we did have some pretty good food. The problem was, it was insipid and overly sweet … so much so that even my kids didn’t want it. In my family I’m known as “the closer” and ended up eating it. Laboriously chewing my way through it (because I hate to waste food), I found myself wondering, “Why am I doing this? How did I get here?”

Things we didn’t eat

Norwegians are really into fish and bread. They have historically specialized in dried cod. They have a process for drying cod by hanging it in a salty marine wind, and once it’s as dry as jerky, they can store it unrefrigerated for thirty years. Here’s what it looks like:

Full disclosure: the above is actually a dried King Cod, which is hung from a ceiling to give good luck. I don’t have the story completely straight because this was an hour into a museum tour and I was getting pretty tired out.

Here’s a place we didn’t eat at:

Look closely: “pimp your hot dog.” Talk about lost-in-translation. But that’s not what turned us off. It was those giant udder-like condiment dispensers. Utterly unappetizing. (Full disclosure: this was not in Norway, but the airport in Frankfurt en route.)

We did not eat at this place because it had permanently closed:

Probably a taqueria in Bergen was a quixotic endeavor to begin with. The fact is, Norwegians don’t eat a single thing that is spicy. We encountered nothing with even a hint of spice, not even black pepper. What a bunch of pansies.

We did not buy one of these fish at the famous open-air fish market:

What a crazy, huge, ugly creature. When we first examined it, its mouth was closed—but then suddenly it gaped open! I about had a heart attack, and the fishmonger laughed with great mirth. She has a little fishing line attached there that she can yank on to frighten the tourists. Probably spends half her day doing that … and I would too.

We did not eat any of these:

I always thought “cheeze doodles” was a playful nickname for Cheetos, but it’s actually a brand. Again, I’m bending the rules here; it’s a Swedish product, from the company Old London Wasa.

We also didn’t eat at McDonald’s, even though we encountered quite possibly the fanciest McDonald’s ever:

They wanted just 20 NOK (about $2.50) for a “Chili Mayo Cheese” burger, which I have to admit is cheap, but then you get what you pay for. I’d rather not participate in the cultural imperialism those Europeans quite rightly complain about.

Weirdness

Yeah, we had some weird food. First, we got these crabs at a high-end grocery; all the meat had been pulled out of the shells (which is a lot of work) and then stuffed into the main shell. Seems like a great service to the consumer, eh?

What made this weird is that the tomalley and other innards (kind of the entrails of the animal) had been shredded up and stuffed in there along with the tasty white crabmeat. It was kind of a lower layer, no doubt there to plump up the overall offering. The first few bites were great, but then we got into murky territory. The tomalley tastes really bad, an intense, putrid sea-stink kind of flavor. What were these grocers thinking?

Then there was this so-called “fish pudding,” which was kind of like tofu except tougher, and of course instead of soybean cake it was reconstituted fish.

The large brick of it did last a long time. Every time my wife would bring it out, the rest of us would groan. “It’s good!” she would say, unconvincingly even to herself, very much in the spirit of fake news. It did fill us up, though (or at least end our interest in eating). Note the 2.4% ABV “Lettøl” (i.e., light) beer in the background—purchased solely to wash down the fish pudding.

Speaking of weird, check out the strange spelling here:

If you saw “appelsinjuicen” on a menu, would you ever dream it was orange juice? That’s just plain mischievous.

Adventures in Norwegian world cuisine

Here’s a pretty nice Italian appetizer:

I mentioned a Vietnamese place earlier, which I couldn’t bring myself to call “cheap” despite its “$” rating. But it was good. Was it authentic? Well, the Asian waiter didn’t speak a word of English, which left him out of the mainstream among Norwegians, so perhaps it was. I’ve never been to Vietnam, but the food didn’t taste Norwegian, anyway. Check out these noodles:

The sauce was a tiny bit grainy, but good. Here’s a soup:

I could never make that at home so I’m going to call it authentic. And this curry was as good as what I’ve had in San Francisco:

Moving on to other world cuisine, I’ll remind you of the very exotic kebab place. And then we encountered this treat, in the free food bin at the hostel, which is bona-fide Russian:

In case you can’t read the label, it says “каша бананоьа.” Hmmm, I guess that’s not so helpful. Phonetically that reads “kasha bananova,” which you can probably guess is banana kasha (porridge). We didn’t actually eat this; my older daughter brought it home as a souvenir for a friend whose ‘rents are from Russia.

Conclusion

If I were a natural born promoter, I would always be sure to finish on a high note, but I guess I’m not. Think back to my first Norway post, though … we did have some darn fine meals in Norway, especially the salmon. And guess what? I have more to say about farmed Norwegian salmon, so check back next week!

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The Food of Norway

Introduction

My family took a trip to Norway recently, during which we ate like kings, for the most part. Given my readers’ obvious appetite for the topic (The Food of London and The Food of Scotland being popular posts), I will share with you what I discovered in Norway.

But first, a caveat: I’m not going to pretend I could give an overall account of how good Norwegian food is, or try to compare it to what I eat in the Bay Area. I was a clueless tourist over there, and judging Norwegian food by the random restaurants I blindly stumbled into would be no fairer than judging San Francisco food by the humdrum fare you get along Fisherman’s Wharf.

Local specialties

I wouldn’t say Norway is a world leader when it comes to cuisine. I just searched Yelp for the best Norwegian restaurants in San Francisco, and it came back with just ten results: Pläj, a Scandinavian place, at #1; Nordic House (a deli) at #2; and a bunch of false positives. The #3 place is classified as “American (new),” #4 and #5 are German, and #6—a place called Dulce Amore—is “modern European.” On to #7 and #8, more delis, and when I got to #9, Safeway (yes, the grocery store), I had to laugh. (By contrast, searching Yelp for top Italian restaurants in San Francisco produced a list of 363 places.)

Still, we did eat some things on vacation that have got to be authentically Norwegian. For example, these meatballs (which are perhaps more iconically Swedish, but still):

And how were they? Damn good! Part of that was the ambience, though … check this place out.

I don’t know what that thing is sticking out of my kid’s mouth. It doesn’t look like a utensil. I hope she didn’t sneak a cigarette. Anyway, I’d definitely eat those meatballs again, but I wouldn’t necessarily take a trip of any length (even just to Pläj) to eat them again.

The next thing that I would say was typically Norwegian was the salmon. More than half of all the salmon eaten in the world comes from Norway. Alas, I don’t have a photo of the best salmon we had there, because I had the stomach flu during that meal and was devoting 100% of my attention toward not projectile-vomiting all over my family across the table. The idea of whipping out my camera never occurred to me (though I suppose I could have captured some breathtaking footage). Anyway, this was at a high-end buffet at a fancy hotel (dinner for three of us was over $140; the fourth family member also had the flu and skipped the meal). So, how was that salmon? My wife said it was the best she’d ever had. I tasted it and thought it was very good, but not as good as what I’d enjoyed in Mallaig, Scotland. (Full disclosure: I did not have the stomach flu in Mallaig.)

Here’s a photo of a nice salmon sandwich I had at the same groovy place pictured above. 

It was really good. But did it stand out over all the other salmon I’ve ever had? Well, not necessarily. It’s not like my eyes rolled back in my head. I guess it doesn’t help that everything in Norway is grotesquely expensive. That sandwich above was around $20. The going rate for a burger is around $25. For that kind of money, the food ought to make me cry (like a NYC bagel recently did). By the way, I have more to say about Norwegian salmon but have decided make that into a future post so we don’t lose steam here.

So here is a bona fide local classic: Bergen fish soup.

My wife had read about this amenity before we went on our trip. It really was something else. We had to restrain ourselves from fighting over it. That white stuff? Cream—but not over-the-top like with New England clam chowder. The green stuff? Parsley oil. There wasn’t a ton of fish in this soup (not like with these cioppinos you get that could be stretched to feed a small village), but the flavor was off the chain. It’s also noteworthy that this was in the touristy restaurant atop Mount Ulriken that, had it been in the U.S., would necessarily have been awful and overpriced (as opposed to just overpriced).

If you hadn’t heard of Bergen, there’s an even more obscure place that lays claim to its own soup: the tiny island of Fedje (pronounced FAY-yeh). My wife asked, at Kafé Losen, if the “fiskesuppe” on the menu was Bergen fish soup; the proprietor seemed almost offended. “No, it’s local recipe!” she assured us. Here it is:

It was really good, too. (I should have included something in the photo for scale, though … that bowl was small, maybe five inches in diameter, for $12. Fortunately this was near the end of our trip and I was already numb.)

So what else is classically Norwegian? Well, they’re known for their heart-shaped waffles. You’ve probably even heard these mentioned in the Nirvana song:

She eyes me like a fiskesuppe when I am blue

I’ve been cooked inside a heart-shaped iron, too

I’ve been topped with lingonberry and sour cream

I wish I could eat your price tag when you scream

(Note: no, Nirvana did not really sing about waffles. Ever.)

Here is a Norwegian waffle (four conjoined hearts, which should have been separated IMHO):

How was it? The earth did not move for me. It was not griddled (ironed?) to order … just pulled from a big flabby stack. Still, the aforementioned condiments would be an asset to any waffle. (Full disclosure: no waffle can ever please me, after my mom’s amazing sourdough waffles made with her ancient waffle iron that was crafted, it seemed, of sterling silver. This iron did such a great job, my brother’s family continued to use it for years after it began catching fire due to an electrical problem.)

So, fancy restaurant meals aside, what do Norwegians typically eat? Here’s a good cross section of what was on offer daily for breakfast at the hostel we stayed at in Bergen:

What are we looking at? I’ll start with the sandwich and move clockwise. That cheese isn’t exactly Swiss but it isn’t exactly not. We saw it everywhere. Also ubiquitous was a brown cheese called mysost (“whey cheese”) that is more quintessentially Norwegian. It looked kind of gross, though, and my daughter who tried it assured me it was, so I never partook. (Hey man, don’t judge. You try suffering for days with the stomach flu in a foreign land and see how adventurous you are.)

Atop the cheese is a thin, salami-esque slice of sheep sausage, and a squeeze of caviar, sort of. They call it kaviar, and it’s smoked cod roe. I left it un-spread for the photo but would spread it across the bread normally (in increasing quantities as I got used to it). The kaviar was really quite tasty. I was disappointed to learn that the Bergen TSA considers it a liquid … they confiscated the half dozen tubes we purchased to bring home to friends. Bastards.

To build back my strength after that flu, I tended to eat three or four of these sandwiches every morning, in addition to the other stuff. Next to the sandwich is some pâté (animal unknown); mackerel in tomato sauce; potato salad (quite mayonnaise-y but mercifully non-sweet); pickled herring; and curried herring. Sometimes I had a bowl of cereal as well. None of it was delicious but it was serviceable and came free with our lodging.

Booze

I’m just going to say it: for those who love to drink, Norway is bound to be a bit disappointing. Wine and spirits must be purchased at a Vinmonopolet (“wine monopoly”), of which there are only 315 in the whole country (as compared to almost 14,000 liquor stores in California, where we can also buy pretty much any booze we want in our grocery stores, even vodka). I never did see a Vinmonopolet during my trip (though I wasn’t exactly scouring the place).

You can buy beer in Norwegian grocery stores, but only a watered-down version with no more than 4.7% ABV. Restaurants occasionally have stronger beer, but mostly they serve the weak beer that’s produced for the Norwegian market (such as the Hansa shown in the restaurant photo above), for around $9 US. A 500 ml bottle will cost you $5 at the grocery store. The logo on this beer can pretty much captures Norway’s attitude toward beer drinkers:

(In the background above is the hotel room art I pondered for hours on end, deliriously, during the worst phase of my stomach flu. Did it seem eerily profound to me that the beer and the art both featured mermaids? Yes ... in my fevered state, it truly did. Did I labor mentally over the incongruity of the art obviously featuring a mermaid, but one with normal feet instead of fins? Yes, that too. Is it a good idea to drink beer when you have the flu? Well, during vacation ... yes again.)

There are microbreweries in Norway, but they also tend to make only the weak beer so they don’t have a hard time selling it due to the usurious taxes applied to stronger stuff. I learned this from a tour guide in Fedje, who mentioned that Norwegians will buy beer in Germany where it’s much cheaper and stronger, but they’re only allowed to bring back a certain amount, and the government will actually spot-check at the border to make sure nobody cheats. Man! What a buzzkill! It’s downright un-American!

Well, imagine my delight when I discovered a boozing loophole: a vending machine at the hostel was selling 500 ml Hansa beers for only 20 NOK (about $2.40 US). Score! I bought a couple cans:

Little did I know, “Lettøl” (which I hadn’t noticed at first) means light beer. Very light. As in, 2.4% ABV. This is how they keep underage kids (which in Norway means under 18) from exploiting the vending machine loophole. If some dumb kid were to consume the 4 or 5 of these it would take to get even slightly drunk, he would be too bloated to escape the authorities. His sprint would be reduced to a frantic waddle, his belly stretched tight as a drum.

I did get a stronger drink at the Magic Ice Bar, a very interesting place where the bar, all the furniture, and even the glasses are made of ice. The drink was some frou-frou cranberry thing, fairly tasty and reasonably strong but not exactly a Super Big Gulp. Note the standard issue parka and gloves in the background … if they’d had any Hansa beer in that place, it would have frozen solid.

Highlights

In addition to the groovy restaurant with the meatballs, the local fish soup, and the great salmon, we had some other delicious fare during our trip. One of the best restaurants we went to was the place in Fedje, Kafé Losen. This was literally the only restaurant open on the entire island (and would close for the season a week after we ate there). They had us by the balls and could have served us anything at any price, but both the proprietor and her husband seemed to take great pride in their food, checking in with us during each course and beaming at the praise. Check out this burger:

They don’t make their own buns, but a nearby bakery does. That thin meat, which the menu merely called bacon, was actually prosciutto di Parma. Below that you’re looking at a nice slab of brie. The beef was delicious and probably grass-fed (to be honest, I didn’t dare ask because I really felt like a burger and didn’t want to have to change my order on principle if it had been grain-fed).

Speaking of baked goods, we had really good bread at several places in Norway. They know what they are doing.

Kafé Losen also served this goat cheese salad:

Look at that disk of goat cheese. It’s like an inch thick. Also some caramelized onions, nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, and the whole thing was perfectly dressed.

It’s time to put on a bib. I am drooling down the front of my shirt. Okay, remember that Bergen fish soup I mentioned, at the Mount Ulriken restaurant? At the same place I had this lamb sausage with associated goodies:

The sausage itself was pretty yum, and all the accouterments were surprisingly tasty (as opposed to the rote garnish & sides you so often get).

The final highlight is this salmon pasta:

I wished that thing in the background had been a big hunk of salmon, but it wasn’t—it was a superfluous piece of focaccia. But the pasta itself was really good—the salmon flavor really came through (and made me wish this was my entrée, but it wasn’t—it was my daughter’s and I had to fight the impulse to appropriate it).

To be continued…

Come back next week for “Food ofNorway Part II,” in which I’ll share Cheap Eats; Fails; Things We Didn’t Eat; Weirdness; and Adventures in Norwegian World Cuisine.

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