Seafood
jjacquet | January 23, 2008The New York Times' Marian Burros has an article today on high mercury levels in tuna sushi:
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Burros also wrote a complementary article reviewing research on the ills linked to mercury:
Elevated mercury levels may be associated not only with neurological problems but with cardiovascular disease among adults as well...[Another] study also suggested that…
jjacquet | January 18, 2008Each year, we grind up one-third of all ocean-caught fish to feed industrially raised pigs, chickens, and farmed fish. That's 30 million tonnes of fish turned into fishmeal and oil. What a waste.
So tomorrow at the Science Bloggers conference in North Carolina, Shifting Baselines will launch and distribute the first 'Eat Like a Pig' seafood wallet cards.
Now in production: The 'Eat Like a Pig' seafood wallet card (front/back).
While I have written extensively about why consumers alone cannot save our fish, I hope this card can raise awareness (to the inexpensive tune of $20 for 1000 cards)…
jjacquet | January 18, 2008Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about how China Says Its Seafood Is Safer.
Regulators say that over the last year, more than 30,000 inspectors have fanned out across the country, working to close shoddy seafood operations and enforce regulations against the use of banned antibiotics, like chloramphenicol and malachite green, which is thought to cause cancer.
Despite those concerns, China's booming aquaculture business grew by $8.7billion last year. The article has some good insights into Chinese politics and even comes with a sprinkling of shifting baselines:
...regulators were…
jjacquet | January 14, 2008Last night 60 minutes aired a special on the King of Sushi, now available online. The presenter begins in Toykyo's Tsukiji market--a $4 billion per year fisheries trading post that Harvard anthropologist Ted Bestor describes as the "Wall Street of fish with no futures market." They watch as one 450-lb. bluefin is brought in its 'tuna coffin' (see image) and then sold for $8500. But where is the tuna coming from?
Next stop is the Mediterranean to witness the Mattanza or annual tuna slaughter. The tonnaras, a complex system of nets to catch tuna as well as a thousand-year-old right of…
jjacquet | January 11, 2008When fishing fanatic Sonia Ball lifted the crab pot out of the water she was disappointed to find its heavy weight was caused by a full load of jellyfish instead of the much-hoped-for mud crabs.That's the opening line on a story today from Australia. Read more here.
jjacquet | January 5, 2008The Golden Globes are so dumb. Not only are they holding the event (January 13th) in spite of the writer's strike, but they've decided to take the Patagonian toothfish (aka Childean sea bass) down with them (maybe it's a badly written joke?). That's right, this January 13th, attendees at the Golden Globes will sit down to feast on sauteed fillets of Chilean sea bass with shitake mushroom a la creme.
As many of you might know, Chilean sea bass is heavily overfished--a national boycott of the delicious fish began in 2002. You might remember the assaults on Al Gore (including my own) when…
jjacquet | January 3, 2008As I've mentioned previously, Michael Pollan will release this month another book on "the tangible material formerly known as food." In Defense of Food grew out of his brilliant essay on nutritionism. Read an excerpt from the first chapter, a review of the book, and check out his book tour. And here are some of his thoughts on omega-3s:
In the years since then, egg producers figured out a clever way to redeem even the disreputable egg: By feeding flaxseed to hens, they could elevate levels of omega- 3 fatty acids in the yolks. Aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat, the animal…
jjacquet | December 26, 2007Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley titled her blog post "Fish Oil Reduces Alzheimers Risk." Who can blame her? ScienceDaily did it, too. I haven't seen the title of the original article in the Journal of Neuroscience, but I suspect the researchers might have even included something about fish oil, too. But in their attempts to frame science, they're encouraging fish consumption for no good reason.
What all these authors really mean is that eating omega-3 fatty acids reduces risk of getting Alzheimers. But wild fish is just one of many good sources of omega-3. Flax seeds, for instance, have…
jjacquet | December 23, 2007Seafood science is indeed a pet obsession. And I got an early Christmas gift in an email about the latest product from the Maryland-based seafood company Phillips: a new formed jumbo lump crab product (see photo). Called "culinary crab" the items consists of 4 to 8 gram formed lumps of crabmeat.
According to Seafood.com News:
Phillips says they have "developed a technique for forming large lumps of crab meat utilizing sections of meat from the crab. Blue swimming crab meat is bound together by natural crab proteins giving customers consistently sized pieces shaped similar to jumbo lump crab…
jjacquet | December 15, 2007Half of the fish we eat is farmed. Read about how at least some of it is raised in this excellent article on Chinese aquaculture in yesterday's New York Times.
jjacquet | December 14, 2007Sea grapes (served with coconut and curry), hand woven baskets full of urchins, sunsets, fishing boats, and yes, the invevitable McDonald's. Some photos from Suva, Fiji...
jjacquet | December 9, 2007In today's New York Times Magazine, there is a great short article on Fish-Flavored Fish to confuse your logic and your tastebuds. To feed demand from the fast food industry (who needs the fishy flavor before they deep fry) one aquaculture company has come up with a way to put the fishy flavor in farmed fish.
This spring, after 10 months of testing, the aquaculture company HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries created what it calls "sea-flavored" tilapia, the first farmed fish manipulated to taste like a wild fish. "It met 10 out of our 10 taste parameters," says HQ's president and C.E.O.,…
jjacquet | December 4, 2007From 1998-2000, the Give Swordfish a Break campaign requested that chefs boycott swordfish until the international fishery commission cut quotas--700 chefs joined in. Here in Vancouver, a sustainable seafood event doesn't happen without the involvement of chefs. Since it opened, there have been a bizillion articles about Hook, D.C.'s sustainable seafood restaurant (including this one in Fortune yesterday, featuring head chef Barton Seaver--in photo).
"The Roman writer Livy once warned that when society's chefs come to be regarded as consequential figures, it is a sure sign that society is…
jjacquet | December 2, 2007Dead on arrival.
November was the month for Atlantic bluefin tuna. Well, it could have been. The New York Times was optimistic but alas, after a week of debates in Turkey, the international tuna commission, in its brilliance, decided to increase the quota for bluefin by 1000 tonnes.
The bluefin is revered by most seafaring people, including Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and promoter of the Sea Ethic. In a guest essay for Grist, Safina explains that ICCAT is "completely broken":
The 43-nation International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas met this month…
jjacquet | November 29, 2007Does anyone have anything that can compete with:
Georgia Cannonball Jellyfish Trawl Fishery?
p.s. This is an experimental mid-water trawl fishery that has recently started up off the Atlantic seaboard. We can expect (as the posts below attest) more jellyfisheries in the future.
jjacquet | November 17, 2007An international conference that ends tomorrow in Turkey could help to rescue the bluefin tuna, according to an opinion piece published in the New York Times today. The U.S. apprently went to the conference with the hopes of banning Atlantic bluefin fishing in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
We know the tuna are in real trouble--worldwide, the bluefin population has plunged more than 90 percent in the last 30 years. But the question is who has the authority to stop the plunder and how. It will have to be a global effort since, as the Times points out, the blame is also global:
Blame for…
jjacquet | November 15, 2007They look as appetizing as a cactus and taste like low tide, but not even that has been enough to keep New Brunswick's green sea urchins out of a prickly predicament.This was the lede to an interesting story on urchin overfishing in yesterday's Seafood News. The article goes on to explain the sea urchin fishery off of New Brunswick and how the Japanese penchant for sweet urchin gonads (sometimes called 'roe') are leading this urchin to an overexploited status.
[Green sea urchins] were once considered a nuisance by some of the same men who now pursue them. Indeed, lobster fishermen once…
jjacquet | November 14, 2007I was recently interviewed for an article for the new Granville magazine here in Vancouver (I enjoyed the experience and odd coincidence that I was also born and raised in Granville, Ohio). The author, Isabelle Groc, did a great job exploring the complications of sustainable seafood in an information era. She touches on the fact that sustainable seafood is currently only for yuppies (a waitress she quries about sustainable seafood tells Groc she might have better luck "at the more fancy restaurants") and that seafood is wildlife (a chef she interviews says, "[Salmon are] not like cattle. It…
jjacquet | November 7, 2007Holy Shifting Tastebuds! For a story right up there with deer meat sushi comes this little article about fake shark fins made from pork. The artificial fins were developed due to the high price of real fins (the rising price being a market response to scarcity--i.e., overfishing). The price of the pig gelatin fins are one-tenth that of the real deal.
For more than 400 million years, sharks have survived the world's seas. But over the last couple decades, the wasteful practice of shark finning has become a global concern, particularly as shark populations show declines and the demand…
jjacquet | October 17, 2007Getting an honest answer to that question is not easy. Two weeks ago, I learned that the National Fisheries Institute (which, despite its official title, is a lobbying group for the fishing industry) was putting $60,000 into promoting seafood as healthy. I wanted to look into the issue more and I was in luck because the details were canned and served by Marian Burros at the New York Times in this article Industry Money Fans Debate on Fish.
I'll just add a small tuna-related health story to the mix. In the U.S., consumers have been warned about canned tuna and told that albacore tuna,…