Patagonia—yes, the company that makes clothing—is getting into the jerky business. It isn’t making the kind of meat-filled jerky you might find at your local gas station, though. The company is instead selling wild salmon jerky. The reason, according to founder Yvon Chouinard, is that sustainably harvested salmon can help ensure a plentiful supply of salmon in the future.
Chouinard explains the problem in a recent essay: "If you catch a salmon in the ocean, you really don’t know where that fish came from. If it’s a sockeye, it may have come from the Fraser River in British Columbia where there was a run of 25 million fish last year (just 12 percent of what the run used to be). But that fish may have also come from a tributary of the Fraser where there are only 20-50 fish left. Or it could be a coho or Atlantic salmon that escaped from a fish farm, and is now loaded with dioxins, antibiotics, fungicides and other chemicals used to "clean" net pens. It could be a Chinook salmon from a hatchery, with all its attendant dumbed-down-gene-pool problems. How does the fisherman know—or the consumer?