Today, join poet, editor, and literary historian Kim Roberts as she takes us to a hatchery - and the journey of a salmon, from birth till your plate.
“Hundreds of tiny fry
crowd the single tank,
churning the water milky.
The fry grow to parr
with wobbly, thick black stripes
as if drawn in a child’s hand.
The parr grow to smolts,
released into ponds.
As they smoltify,
they turn silver, grow scales.
Their ponds go saline
and they grow, they fatten.
They bulk up, fish up,
they chinook, they chum,
they coho, they sockeye.
They don’t run, or redd,
or spawn, or kelt.
No ocean, no river,
no homing. No anadromy.
They don’t properly pink
so far from habitat.
So they’re fed a food
made from themselves;
they are cannibalized
for color: soylent salmon.
And they are fed twice
as many pounds as they grow—
a crazy economy.
Still they are created
in the thousands, packed
into writhing tanks like shooting fish
in a barrel. Three years
from artificial insemination
to the flap of a caudal fin,
to the bagel on my plate.”
Hatchery has been reproduced here with permission from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.