There are lots and lots of people who will not eat factory farmed meat, but I am one of the only people I know who will not eat farmed fish. It all goes back to one time when I was a kid. We went to one of those fish farms meant for private fishers. Basically, there are two kinds of fish farming out there. There is the fish farm industry which produces most of the processed seafood that you eat in your daily life. Fish sticks, fish and chips, and even the baked salmon you order at your local seafood chain probably come from fish farms. These places are supposed to be pretty sterile, but in reality they are massively crowded. The fish are stuffed into small pond of water, crawling around on top of each other amidst heavy pollution. How do I know? Because I visited the second kind of fish farm as a kid.
Your typical aquaculture farm isn't accessible to the community, but many of these fish farms supply salmon, catfish, trout, and other freshwater creatures to farm fishing lakes. Basically, these are places where dads who don't know how to fish can take their kids to catch their own fish. At this kind of fish farm, the lakes are literally jumping with them. The one we went to had hundreds upon hundreds of catfish, all bounding for the bait in a feeding frenzy. There is no challenge to catching something at a fish farm. There's no sport to it at all. You drop a worm in the water and three fish bite for it. They are probably just committing suicide to get away from the crowded conditions.
The water was murky, the fish was disgusting, and the whole experience at that fish farm was so unpleasant that I never wanted to eat fish again. Of course, a few years later I would eat ocean fish, but it was years before I would touched a freshwater fish. To this very day, I won't eat anything from the sea unless I know that it really is from the sea. Farm raised fish is right out, no matter how clean and sanitary the conditions are supposed to be. I figured that if fish farms are that disgusting when they invite visitors in, the ones that you don't get to see are probably that much worse. The idea makes me feel queasy and sick to my stomach.
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