Help me understand this question that nobody I’ve asked has been able to answer.
Those tiny vertebrae in canned salmon that I remember back to childhood: who do they belong to? What have we been eating here, people?
The InterWebs have lots of folks asking if they are edible or can you get salmon without them (yes and yes) but nothing I’ve found so far says what kind of fish they belong to.
For example: Can You Eat The Bones In Canned Salmon? Solved (2023)
So here’s the deal
The typical domestic-reared or wild-caught salmon is a big fish. They are the prey of large marine mammals like seals and dolphins, and devoured during spawning by grizzlies. I’m guessing a grown salmon’s vertebrae are the size of a half-dollar.
If the bones are salmon, these quarter-inch bones that you crunch in that paddie could only be the bones of salmon fry the size of minnows. What’s up with that?
Nowhere do I find anything that identifies these crunchy bits as anything but salmon bones. That can’t be right.
The tiny fish-lets could not be stomach contents from the bigger fish. Those would be discarded when the fish was gutted and cleaned.
They would have to either be ADDED to the canned fish, and therefore included in the can’s required description of contents, or be salmon.
So where does the answer lie?
This is one of life’s great mysteries, Scully. But the TRUTH is OUT THERE!
So I'm reaching the conclusion that the bones in the can are salmon bones, finding nothing to contradict that. I have not been able to discover the SIZE of the salmon being canned, but the must be smaller than the spawning salmon that migrate back up their source waters. I would not think they would harvest immature fish, but maybe.
I guess I had fish farming in mind. How long does it take salmon to reach full size? And how many babies can one mama have? I'm thinking if they have enough breeders around, and then had the babies in captivity so they were easy to fatten up and scoop up, all on the cheap, maybe that's their trick? Option B: they harvest the bigger fish for more pricy fillets, and then cram all the un-filletable littles into cans "because, come on, if they're eating fish from cans, how discerning can they be?" For the record, they said it, not me.