I eat hotdogs. Usually the beef hotdogs, but still I'm hardly in a position where fried calamari is going to be the most likely vector by which I eat a rectum. Also, fried calamari is great.
I'm getting pickier as I age, but I'm having trouble knowing that the McRib is back and not having one.
It does offer evidence for my belief that no one actually likes to eat squid, as all the flavor comes from deep-frying. They like to have eaten squid.
Also, fried calamari is great.
This is very true. So great, in fact, that as long as it tastes right I don't really care what's in it.
3: I also eat it where you stuff the bag portion and cook those in sauce. When we do that, we always cook the tentacles in sauce also, but those don't actually taste very good. Obviously, this form of preparation is off topic because when you are cooking a whole squid, you are obviously not dealing with a pig rectum.
Calamari is fantastic, and don't have a problem eating any given part of a pig, since they're made entirely of yum. Plus, I've been linking to bung droppers here for years.
Raw calamari is pretty bad but still better than raw octopus.
Don't care for calamari, personally. There are so many better choices for things to deep fry and dip in marinara sauce.
3, 5: I prefer it grilled. When fresh, it's fantastic. Just add a little lemon juice and I can't think of much better. I don't see the point of frying it - I think that fried calamari is the way people who don't really like calamari prefer it.
The tentacles are the best part.
I've been tempted to tell everyone about it whenever calamari comes up
I hope that you would do so in your best Cornholio voice.
For some time I've wondered about (but never ordered) those "chicken rings" at White Castle. Exactly what part of a chicken is supposed to be ring-shaped?
Which creature chews on four rectums in the morning, two rectums in the afternoon, and three rectums in the evening?
14 cont'd: the answer is squid
Nobody has ever eaten chitlins in place of calamari! The whole thing is made up!
Sheez.
Tweety and I ate amaaaaazing salt and pepper fried calamari with friends at a Chinese place in LA last weekend, and one of the friends wouldn't touch the calamari because of that story. Her loss! It was great. But my thoughts on the story:
1. Squid is cheap and plentiful, and not very hard to clean. I'm sure pig butthole is also cheap, but the cleaning is more difficult. I'm not sure it would actually be cheaper.
2. Calamari does have a distinctive taste! It also plumps up in a particular way when cooked that , well, I'm not familiar with pig rectum specifically, but pig intestine certainly doesn't.
3. Also, apo's 6.middle.
I also eat it where you stuff the bag portion and cook those in sauce. When we do that, we always cook the tentacles in sauce also, but those don't actually taste very good.
In the version I've made of this, the tentacles get chopped up and added to the stuffing. Because of the above-mentioned plumping tendency, you can stuff the body somewhat loosely, but then by the time you take it out of the oven everything is packed super tightly and they look like little torpedos. That is somehow really satisfying.
We got our version from my grandma who was either passing down a storied family recipe or just trying to see what she could get us kids to eat.
But even without squid in the filling, you still have to watch how much filling you put it. If it is full before cooking, it goes explody on you.
Raw calamari is pretty bad but still better than raw octopus.
I'm skeptical, although I'm not sure I've ever eaten squid raw.
As for pig rectum, I never really thought about it, but I guess I would eat it? I've eaten intestines of enough animals, after all, so there's no principle to stand on.
I'm having trouble knowing that the McRib is back and not having one.
You don't have a back?
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Anyone know why Unfogged text won't wrap on Dolphin and if there's a fix?
Actually, I really only care about the latter.
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Also 3 is silly, evidence for which is the deliciousness of sauteed calimari.
I think Bloom is right that squid is very cheap, so who would bother doing this. Like all the rumors about Suspicious Ethnic Restaurant chopping up dogs and cats. Yeah, that would be more cheap and efficient than industrial chicken protein.
Calamari is something that I try to get at as many restaurants as possible. Once have I encountered it when every ring was identical. That one might have been some sort of reconstituted substitute, but hog anus? Perhaps not.
In the TAL piece they asserted that pork bung would be less than half the price of squid.
1. Squid is cheap and plentiful, and not very hard to clean. I'm sure pig butthole is also cheap, but the cleaning is more difficult. I'm not sure it would actually be cheaper.
That's intuitively plausible, but I'm going to need to run through the math first.
Damn, pwned by 26. But I added value!
A friend and I made up an Intrepid Eating scale by which you could score yourself on the basis of things you'd tried. I guess pork asshole would be high-ish. I don't remember the details, such as they were.
Also 3 is silly, evidence for which is the deliciousness of sauteed calimari.
Also, grilled peri-peri calamari. Sooo delicious.
Even if you can't save money by substituting pig rectums for squid, there still may be people doing it for reasons of craft. Those molecular gastronomy types like a challenge.
Anyway, there are other end use markets for hog rectum.
I can take or leave calamari, but grilled octopus is great.
Also, grilled peri-peri calamari. Sooo delicious.
It's short for perineum.
I guess pork asshole would be high-ish.
As long as it were cleaned and cooked, it doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. I'd rank it far below things with gross textures, or things that are more viscerally disgusting, like eyeballs or maybe brains. (Have eaten brains, wouldn't touch eyeballs.)
there's a No Reservations ep where Bourdain went out into the south African bush and ate a grilled warthog rectum with a local tribe. he got mightily sick from that.
re: hot dogs.... i have a book of sausage recipes which says you need veal hearts to make its frankfurters. i have not made its frankfurters.
Pork asshole has to rank below live squid, right?
40: Not sure. I know how to do the first one, but how does one "live squid"?
Just like, be fearless and in the moment, take risks, and be invertebrate, you know?
but how does one "live squid"?
I think it involves wearing a yellow rubber wristband, or something.
grilled warthog rectum
That may be close enough linguistically to "anal warts" for me to avoid.
The joke falls apart unless you guys know some way to pork an asshole.
I'll show you at the meet-up, heebs.
Live squid tastes best when eaten underwater while engaged in vicious hand to tentacle combat.
I was never brave enough to eat the eye tacos at that one place in SB.
I just emailed a kid whose email is analsmith. Through no fault of his. Just the first initial, middle initial, unfortunate last name that starts oddly with "al".
And I figure why eat brains now when I'll be subsisting on them in my next life as a zombie.
Wait, "Alsmith" is a last name? And his parents gave him the initials "A.N."?
46: It's not being held in Lab's colon.
every ring was identical. That one might have been some sort of reconstituted substitute
I've been told that cheap Chinese restaurant scallops that all look identical are skate punched out with a cookie cutter, but I have no idea if that's true.
51: Not smith, but a regular standalone last name, preceded by "al".
I also think I avoided ever eating octopus eyes?
It is true that seafood is routinely mislabeled on restaurant menus - cheaper / less appetizing species are sold as something more prestigious. There have been studies (based on genetic analysis) that show that certain dishes (e.g. grouper and Dover sole, IIRC) are more likely to be fake than real. The problem often originates deeper in the supply chain, with the fish wholesalers ripping off the restaurant owners, though the owners may be tacitly complicit in the fraud.
So it isn't completely implausible that some hog rectum could find its way into the supply chain.
51: It would be hard to resist that temptation.
analsmith
Anuses don't make themselves.
That may be close enough linguistically to "anal warts" for me to avoid.
I've avoided 'Turducken' for similar reasons.
12, 25, 32: I envy you in your delusions.
Fried calamari usually is served with the tentacles. If those are missing, it means that the "squid" was prepared upstream of the restaurant kitchen. In that case, it has been deep frozen, will taste like a rubber band.
Squid is completely delicious, I am so grateful to be able to buy fresh. Grilled with lemon, garlic, and oregano in a basket. Maybe toss on a few pine nuts.
It is true that seafood is routinely mislabeled on restaurant menus - cheaper / less appetizing species are sold as something more prestigious
Or even something non-prestigious that they just happen to be out of: there was a Boston Globe article about this last year that included a few instances of something else being served in the place of bluefish. Bluefish!
ate a grilled warthog rectum with a local tribe.
I have eaten warthog carpaccio several times - it was delicious. There were no rectums involved, AFAIK. I had to get over the psychological barrier to eating raw pork by reassuring myself that warthogs are not actually taxonomically proximate to domesticated pigs.
Eyeballs were definitely very high on the scale. I would not happily eat eyeballs.
Since it's Burns Day, someone should mention haggis in the weird food thread. Here you go.
63: Unless you have a colostomy, there was at least one rectum involved.
I can take or leave calamari, but grilled octopus is great.
64. Sam Vimes looked at the mouthful. And it looked back.
"The best part," said Jabbar, and made appreciative suckling noises. He added something in Klatchian. There was some muffled laughter from the other men around the fire.
"This looks like a sheep's eyeball," said Vimes, doubtfully.
"Yes, sir," said Carrot. "But it is unwise to--"
"You know what?" Vimes went on. "I think this is a little game called 'Let's see what offendi will swallow'. And I'm not swallowing this, my friend."
Jabbar gave him an appraising look.
The sniggering stopped.
"Then it is true that you can see further than most," he said.
"So can this food," said Vimes. "My father told me never to eat anything that can wink back."
There was one of those little hanging-by-a-thread moments, which might suddenly rock one way or the other into a gale of laughter or sudden death.
Then Jabbar slapped Vimes on the back. The eyeball shot off his palm and into the shadows.
"Well done! Extremely good! First time it have not worked in twenty year! Now sit down and have proper rice and sheep just like mother!"
64. Sardines?
Oh, are there eyeballs in there? I mash up my sardines to make the organs and bones and such less identifiable.
56: It is true that seafood is routinely mislabeled on restaurant menus - cheaper / less appetizing species are sold as something more prestigious.
IIRC, this was specifically discussed in the TAL episode and percentages were in the range of 40-50%. And I think they mentioned LA* as having had the highest rate in the study.
*If you think I specifically mention this to bait Robert "Hoist on his own dog genetics story petard" Halford,** you are right.
**Although I'm not sure if the veldt-diet mythoscience has yet to embrace the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.***
**.last to 47 as well.
71.** I was going to say that Eva was my favorite aquatic ape YA novel, but it turns out I got confused and it's a chimpanzee-human brain swap novel and it's A Bone from a Dry Sea that's my favorite. But what is up with Peter Dickinson and ape books?
71.*: It really is an auto-petard hoist, since it implies that the people who freakin' tamed wolves ate a lot of carbs.
I love the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. It really ought to be true.
73: Does one book a genre make? I certainly don't know of any others.
74: Yes, that is a fundamental take away. But I was more cheered by the part at the end where veterinarians warn against low-carb diets for dogs (He said he and his colleagues were befuddled by the trend toward pricey low-carb dog foods and raw diets, which could stress dogs' kidneys with their extra protein load.) because that is what they adapted to. Then the obvious extension by analogy* to humans.
*Yeah, I know. But I have unilaterally declared the topic to be an analogy ban free zone given the nature of the topic.
76: I think the point is that by having a "favorite" such book, you're implicitly suggesting there's more than one to choose among. </standpipe>
76: Yeah, I thought I was the one making the joke that really there can be only one. Probably should have assumed Moby was in on it.
71: I've semi-committed to not eating fish, anyway, for environmental reasons. Not eliminated from the diet completely but I probably eat 5% as much fish as I did 10 years ago. Nothing wrong with eating certain species but the labeling and figuring out the fish market problems are too intense. Not that my lame ass semi boycott will actually accomplish anything, it's just that if we're anywhere near a place where squid are in danger I don't want to have memories of indifferently dining through the collapse of the ocean.
I just emailed a kid whose email is analsmith. Through no fault of his. Just the first initial, middle initial, unfortunate last name that starts oddly with "al".
The canonical example of getting hosed by e-mail account naming conventions was M/ary El/izabeth Cum/mings; her institution (as was common in the '90s) created account names by taking the first six letters of the last name, followed by first initial, middle initial.
80. In a number of places where the actual fish have been depleted by human consumption, the squid have taken over. I don't know about individual species, but squid in general are doing just fine.
I've semi-committed to not eating fish, anyway, for environmental reasons.
If you're choosing your food consumption based on environmental consequences, I think your bacon habit would become hard to justify.
Sure, but it's just another link in the chain waiting for an implosion, and I don't want to have to keep up with whatever species are in or out (assuming that this information is reasonably available and things are properly labeled, neither of which is really true). Easier to just write it all off. Also 71 was about fish, not squid.
Meat consumption is at least an agricultural industry that can be made relatively sustainable (particularly those kinds of meat, like bison, which I prefer). Fish consumption, broadly speaking, is not, and the oceans are literally collapsing while we speak. Everyone has to pick their battles but fish is in general not appetizing for me these days.
How's jellyfish? They seem to be doing well.
Generally they say that eating the smaller, lower on the chain species is better, so jellyfish (probably most squid) or anchovies are sort of OK. But it's all pretty confusing. I like pickled jellyfish that you get in Chinese restaurants a lot.
88. Not really. Over fishing of Anchovies: Threat to Magellanic penguins and Guano Bird populations
The MBA makes it reasonably easy to know which fish are best avoided for which reasons.
Well, 89 is basically the reason I feel better just mostly writing fish off. Do I have time to keep up on current anchovy populations? Fuck no.
Meat consumption is at least an agricultural industry that can be made relatively sustainable (particularly those kinds of meat, like bison, which I prefer).
I'm led to believe that this is nonsense, that widespread meat consumption in the quantities that Americans prefer cannot, under anything like current conditions, be made sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word. Is that wrong? Or do you mean "sustainable" in the sense of, "very rich people can eat bison in the quantities that they wish, because heirloom bison farming can be a sustainable enterprise."
In practice, that MBA site (which I've tried to use for years) is confusing in any given case (do I know where this skate was caught and whether its a pacific blue* or Atlantic orange? No.), and also doesn't address the problem of rampant mislabeling. Also it recommends things like eating anchovies. I mean it's better than nothing, but I've found it practically pretty unmanageable.
*making this up.
Anyone know why Unfogged text won't wrap on Dolphin and if there's a fix?
The only fix I've found is to use Opera Mobile. It's the only browser that wraps Unfogged on my phone these days.
92 -- your conclusion is wrong. It's unlikely we can have very cheap meat to feed world population at current size before demographic transition happens everywhere, so meat will (and should) get more expensive, but there is not imminent danger of a collapse of the ability to provide meat to humans, nor is there anything inherently unsustainable in meat production.
I had to get over the psychological barrier to eating raw pork by reassuring myself that warthogs are not actually taxonomically proximate to domesticated pigs.
Since Emerson's not here, I'll take it upon myself to point out that the pork industry has virtually eliminated trichina worms from domesticated pigs. You can still get trichinosis from taxonomically unrelated species, including bear and warthogs.
95: you mean except for the problem of greenhouse gases, right? (I'm ignoring the issue of the conditions in which animals are raised and slaughtered, as I haven't a clue what you mean by sustainable.)
Although, wait, by "sustainable" you seem to mean an industry that can keep producing a product, rather than an industry that can keep producing a product without destroying the environment around it. If that's the case, I'm sure that meat is sustainable, yes.
Trichinitis is also worth watching out for.
Do you mean emissions from cow methane? I mean, that's a significant problem, but one that can and should be priced into any kind of cap and trade/carbon tax regime. It's a reason why new should get more expensive, but its not a "sustainability" issue in the way that it is for the fish stocks.
98: Of course, so is seafood by that standard.
98 -- by "without destroying the environment around it" do you mean anything different than the same kind of regulations you'd want to see for any other industry that's causing problems? I mean, you also can't create steel in unregulated ways without "destroying the environment" but we've regulated our way around that.
100: If you make fish more expensive to catch/buy, fish stocks would recover for some areas/species. Catch limits and things like that have worked.
103 is totally true. The problem is that the total collapse is happening right now, and there's no real regulatory regime even potentially on the horizon that could actually promote stock sustainability (for many species) before they collapse entirely.
Trichinitis? I don't care if the little bastards suffer from inflammation. They can go infect some ibuprofen or something.
100: yes, methane from all livestock (pigs and chickens fart and shit, too; I learned that from Everyone Poops). And if we're talking about creating entirely new regulatory regimes for dealing with problems of sustainability in commodity chains, the same can be done for overfishing, right?
Also it recommends things like eating anchovies.
Is this bad because anchovies aren't actually environmentally okay to eat, or because you don't like anchovies?
104: And the regulatory potential for greenhouse emissions from agriculture is that much easier?
It's not about preference, Blume; it's about sustainability. If you just keep your eye on the ball, you can save the planet. Early man will show you the way.
Anchovies are bad, but sardines are great.
I thought we had a thread where it was determined that one can't responsibly eat any fish ever.
111: I thought we had a thread where it was determined that one can't responsibly eat.
112: I thought we had a thread.
106: yes, but we have now, and will have in the future, regulations to deal with livestock methane. Some of which around you, you can read about here:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/regact/2010/capandtrade10/coplivestockfin.pdf
The same isn't really true with fish. Sure, fish could be sustainable with a proper international regulatory regime but that's not close to being on the horizon, while (again for some, not all) species the collapse is happening right now. Not really comparable to meat, which is one polluting industry among many.
107 see 99. I personally have no real idea whether a chokes are OK to eat. I love how they taste, myself.
98: There is an argument (which I kind of agree with but I'm not going to stick my neck out too far defending it) that bison is sustainable because there were wild bison herds in the Mid-West/Prairie parts of the world. Letting these areas be grazed by bison (or maybe even cattle) is not as disruptive to native ecosystems (grasses, etc.) as growing soy or corn. Methanol would have been released by these herds so it's not like the earth can't take care of things - it's that we've added a lot of other sources of pollution which reduce the earth's ability to keep things under control.
I'm also on the no-fish thing with Halford. There are too many variables to keep track of (gear type, fishing location, common names, likely substitutions) that I can't really justify eating any fish. Except, fortunately, lobster (at least this year), scallops (farmed) and muscles (farmed). That said, I do sometimes eat tuna and feel guilty.
It's not about preference, Blume; it's about sustainability.
But... but... I like anchovies! Fresh ones are a pain to cook though, what with pulling out all those teeny guts.
106: There is some suggestion that decreasing populations of fish lead to increasing rarity which means people are willing to pay more to eat the last of some species (e.g. certain types of tuna). Unlike with terrestrial systems, marine systems are very hard to regulate and to enforce the regulations. I'm sure there are more recent examples, but things like fishing with the wrong sized net is only illegal within certain waters and right outside those limits (in international waters), it's totally fine. And, of course, fish are mobile and follow water temperatures and nutrient upwellings which are kind of predicable but do move around from season to season and year to year and will move outside protected areas. Finally (I'm sure I said all of this last time we talked about this), smaller fish are only good to eat in comparison to big fish because we've already eaten all the big fish and the small fish populations are up because they have fewer predators. And if we eat all the small fish, we're never going to get the big ones back.
If all the wild fisheries collapse, will anyone notice, or will we all just eat farmed tilapia that gets labeled as different kinds of fish and watch reruns of Jacques Cousteau and think we are looking at the oceans as they are now?
115: again, as I suggested above, I'll grant you that it's possible to make meat a sustainable industry, if one factors greenhouse gases into sustainability, at relatively small scales (thus making meat available only to very rich people). For example, in the case of methane scrubbing and captures, the size of the enterprise has to be relatively tiny for it to work in any sort of way that we might consider sustainable. But of course you can't have small populations of livestock if you want to feed the world meat (even assuming you don't want to feed the world meat in the insane quantities that Americans, much less paleo Americans, consume).
That is probably widely true, but not everywhere and for everyone. If you shop at an actual fish market (yeah, listen to me, the asshole in her coastal yuppie enclave) (except that the fish market is actually run by old Portuguese dudes and has been there forever) and are buying whole fish, you're not going to get tilapia and think it's something else.
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Has hannahmermaid.com already been noted here? The site is a teensy bit NSFW, and has annoying music (Moby alert), but yeah, wow, it's a funny old world.
Hannah Fraser is a professional mermaid and environmentalist, who creates her own functional yet highly artistic tails. She features in short films,music videos, ad campaigns, photo shoots, environmental docos, large events, aquariums and parties.
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I guess with the fisheries angle, that didn't actually need a pause/play.
And our fish market is definitely not keyed into sustainability; they seem to make a lot of money on Japanese people buying sushi-grade tuna, and on people buying haddock and halibut for their dinner parties. (They ask what you're buying for, so you end up hearing what everyone in line ahead of you is doing with their fish.) But they're psyched if you ask them for something cheap to broil whole, and will sing the praises of poor-people fish, porgies or spots or scups or other little fishes. You can also buy scraps for soup, and they will beam at you if you tell them you're going to use a stock you made from fish heads.
And our fish market is definitely not keyed into sustainability; they seem to make a lot of money on Japanese people buying sushi-grade tuna, and on people buying haddock and halibut for their dinner parties. (They ask what you're buying for, so you end up hearing what everyone in line ahead of you is doing with their fish.) But they're psyched if you ask them for something cheap to broil whole, and will sing the praises of poor-people fish, porgies or spots or scups or other little fishes. You can also buy scraps for soup, and they will beam at you if you tell them you're going to use a stock you made from fish heads.
I'll absolutely grant that at current world population and production methods, "feeding the world meat" is not sustainable. World meat prices need to rise (as should food prices in the developed world more generally) and the industry should be more regulated. OTOH it's perfectly possible to have meat as an ongoing enterprise available to the world rich (which, on a global scale, includes most of the US population), and declining world population plus regulation should make a sustainable meat business possible and profitable.
None of that makes meat consumption really comparable, at all, to (most) fish consumption in the current climate.
they will beam at you if you tell them you're going to use a stock you made from fish heads and also you are Blume. If you are Sifu they will eventually, silently sell you what you want and send you on your way.
I should take Smearcase with me there sometime. The old dude loves Wagner.
123: That's charming! I imagine designing and swimming in those tails requires a lot of ingenuity and strength.
I like fish, alot. It would be great to see how far we can get in improving fish farming by regulation.
My daughter arrives tonight for a visit, during which I expect at least 3 lectures on not eating farmed fish.
It would be easier to take if she wasn't right.
The thing about fish/seafood is that I think that it is the last part of the industrialized West's food chain which relies on a significant proportion* of food being captured/gathered "in the wild." So the land equivalent has already been for the most part depleted and confined to the margins a long time ago.
*I'm now curious as to the current proportions of framed vs. wild fish.
131: So hunt down the remaining free fish and kill those fuckers?
102: sorry, I hand't seen this. Rather than getting into what I'd prefer, because my preferences are likely only to be relevant in Ponyland, I'm still trying to figure out if it's true that, as you assert, eating meat (one assumes mindfully*) is a more sustainable practice than eating fish (also mindfully). As I said above, I'm led to believe (pretty reliably, but I certainly could be wrong about that) that eating meat is only sustainable if the meat industry is scaled back to the point that it looks almost nothing like it does currently (heirloom bison!). I'm led to believe that the same is true for eating fish.
* Meaning, with some attention paid to the ethics of one's purchases and consumption.
132: framed fish are those ones that talk and sing? Because I hate those.
I guess the best way to hunt krill would be trained humpback whales.
If all the wild fisheries collapse, will anyone notice, or will we all just eat farmed tilapia that gets labeled as different kinds of fish and watch reruns of Jacques Cousteau and think we are looking at the oceans as they are now?
If fish screamed, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
133 -- I'm sure she has a different solution in mind.
134 -- I've said before that I'd like to see bison raising increase, hugely. Especially on the northern plains.
129: I know Smearcase is getting on, but I don't think referring to him as "the old dude" is quite appropriate.
137: We might, if they screamed all the time for no reason. (Because someone had to make it explicit.)
(And now I'm going to head home for lunch, to finish the last of the [farmed] steelhead chowder. Yum!)
139: I would like to see that too! And lots more wolves! But now we're into ponyland. Instead, the Northern Plains will very likely be given over almost entirely to fracking in the next few decades. And I fear that ponies (and bison) don't like to be fracked.
Christ, this topic is depressing. One upside is maybe we'll find out the upper limits on squid size in the absence of predators.
I'm glad Von Wafer showed up to make a sustained argument for what I was thinking when I wrote 83.
134 -- and. I think that's a pretty silly way of thinking about the comparison, for reasons that have been articulated here already. Buying (non-super sustainable) meat in the current climate is like buying a car -- it's a practice that, if globally scaled under current production and technology, is unsustainable. Consuming (many species of) fish is directly contributing to a mass extinction within a 20-40 year frame. And that's largely because of specific issues related to fish, including their wild-caught nature, difficulty of international regulation, labeling problems, etc.
Then we'll have calamari for which no hog rectum can plausibly substitute.
it's a practice that, if globally scaled under current production and technology, is unsustainable
No scaling is required. They're both, at present, unsustainable, just with a longer time frame.
146: the point, Halford, is that the smart money says that buying meat in "the current climate" (heh!) is very possibly "directly contributing to a mass extinction" of all species. And that short of completely overhauling the industry, your decision to buy heirloom bison is no different from some other person's decision to buy ethically caught wild salmon at Whole Foods -- it makes not a bit of difference in the big picture. Again, neither of these industries, unless they change in ways that at present seem impossibly ponyish, are sustainable (though for different reasons). So eat all the meat you want, paleo boy, but maybe stop telling yourself that your consumption patterns are in any meaningful way sustainable.
143: And I fear that ponies (and bison) don't like to be fracked.
Not meaning to harsh your doomsday buzz, but the impact of fracking on the bison farming capabilities of the northern Plains is marginal at best.
There's some truth in 148 (though scale and time frame are not unimportant issues!) But the broader point is that industrial meat production is basically like any other largely unsustainable product of industrialization, from airplanes to cars to nickel batteries to power plants to whatever; fish consumption (because: international, wild, on brink of actual extinctions, difficulty labeling, etc.) is, whatever you think of it, something different.
scale and time frame are not unimportant issues
Agreed, especially from the standpoint of personal consumption.
149 -- I think I've pretty clearly demonstrated some reasons why meat and fish consumption are different, with meat being more like ordinary insustrial consumption and fish being somethin different, and I think they are, but if you want to be an asshole about it, be my guest. (BTW, the grass-fed beef/bison movement is at least a pretty good thing for sustainability, at least much better than the current system).
And lots more wolves!
And elephants! and we need to reverse engineer those 6 foot sloths!
144: We won't see the biggest squid because we've wiped out most of their food supply. It's trophic levels all the way down.
OT I: I have never particularly liked David Mamet, but his Daily Beast rubbish about guns today is exceptionally crappy, in that 2003-vintage Victor Davis Hanson "use the words 'Solons' and 'myrmidons' a lot" way. Which is not a compliment. (I say that as a pretentious twit myself!)
OT II: I would prefer never to have known that Slate is "recapping" [glowers, grinds teeth] the new season of Archer. I don't mind when Slate ruins useless, stupid things* with its banal, timid cultural-ambulance-chasing, but I wish they'd leave Sterling Archer and his colleagues alone.
* Literature, history, economics, music, the cinema, television between eight p.m. and eleven p.m. on Sunday evenings.
2003-vintage Victor Davis Hanson
The typical destination when the party leaves one, no?
153: I'm sorry for slaughtering your sacred cow.
Dammit, clew, couldn't you have left me my daydream of squirming horrors rising from the deep?
157: Aw. Of course, if we don't speak up when Slate comes for literature, history, etc. On the other hand, Mary Beard has been a delight recently, and also a research hairdresser has probably worked out the coiffure of the Vestal Virgins. (This is more useful if you want to decontaminate `Myrmidons' than if you want to decontaminate _Archer_. Can't help you with _Archer_.)
We can hope for the seaworms:
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
as should food prices in the developed world more generally
Food scarcity is increasingly a real problem for people in the developed world. We aren't in some happy post-scarcity world here.
"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."
Not likely to get better in the next two years, either.
The only good news I've heard recently was that some farmer-intensive, polycultural, bio-mimicry farming has been doing well in the droughts and floods in the central US. Note that the max output of these systems in good years is lower than the high-input system they're trying to amend, so this isn't a magic pony fix, but it might be a higher minimum than we feared we would get. (Or not. There were sustainable operations in the Dust Bowl who kept their grass cover, but it didn't do them any good, as the soil destroyed by business-as-usual landed on them in smothering drifts.)
164: From too much love for living,
From hope and fear set free...
Professional mermaid, research hairdresser: the rewards of third-wave feminism.
Professional mermaid, research hairdresser
Sometimes the internet actually increases my love of humanity.
re: 166
I've read similar things about other places. That traditional farming and irrigation practices in many areas may be lower yield, and more labour intensive, but they are also more resistant to shocks like drought. It may be slightly apocryphal, but there were apparently farms [not those in the most marginal land, obviously] successfully producing food during the Ethiopian drought/famine of the early 80s.
Whether those traditional methods can produce the sorts of yields that we've become used to post 'Green revolution' is another question.
I'm not ready to give up sushi quite yet but aside from that a quick and dirty method (at least in the U.S.) for eating fish responsibly is to eat stuff caught in Alaska. From what I've read Alaska seems pretty well managed on that front.
There is plenty of lying about where fish comes from, though, right?
171: Probably. I mostly buy at Costco, who I assume is a bit more reliable about their sources than some corner store.
The only fix I've found is to use Opera Mobile. It's the only browser that wraps Unfogged on my phone these days.
Yeah, that seems to be about the size of it. I'm trying out both Opera and Dolphin, so I'll count this as a point in Opera's favor.
The Moral Economy of the Peasant starts by describing really-non-market food systems as , generally, designed to reduce the chances of utter disaster; works out what morals are required for that; and explains some of the particularly bad interactions of traditional societies with the world market (mostly in SE Asia) in terms of the violated moral economy of the peasant.
The Anglosphere has probably been doomed since the acceptance of consumer credit. Possibly doomed since credit tout court, to get all Braudelian about it.
Back to realism -- Transition Towns look like they've gotten a lot further in the UK than the US. Do you know the rumor on what they're like to live in?
174 to 169. To 170 -- mostly true, although my fishing cousins are seeing debt-driven harvesting come up the shore. Also, probably worth making noise about mining and drilling in Alaska.
On the back of the envelope, I'm not sure California got more wealth out of gold than it lost to the fisheries and damaged soil. Obviously *some* people got more, and CA has had the benefit of early-mover wealth since the rush, and the fisheries might have been destroyed anyway, but with big rounding I think we're on the poor side of break-even.
I want to make a joke along the lines of "you can tell which fish are from Alaska, because [stereotype about people from Alaska]", but I don't know any stereotypes about people from Alaska.
You can tell which fish are from Alaska, because they're all dudes?
143 -- Wolves are doing quite well these days. Just ask anyone from Idaho. We're running way over the targets here as well.
Our wild fish are from Alaska, mostly. This time of year, we don't have much in the way of wild fresh fish. (The steellhead was delicious, by the way, and at 2.99 lb, tough to beat for value.)
"you can tell which fish are from Alaska, because [stereotype about people from Alaska]" they're three times as expensive as the other fish.
The Dwarf Lord is thinking about pond aquaculture, because it's hackable, and decent food production for someone allergic to ... everything, and can theoretically be very clean: inputs are trash and bugs, output is useful fertilizer.
For most fish, though, you need wild stocks healthy enough to harvest eggs or fry -- we can't breed them in ponds, though we can get more of them bigger than they would be in the wild.
you can tell which fish are from Alaska, because
...they can see Russia from their porch.
Oolichan, preferably. As far as we can tell, no-one has even tried, so we should start with something else.
In Bohemia, pond aquaculture to produce carp as a protein source for impoverished peasants forbidden to hunt in the forests close to their villages has been pretty successful for many centuries. The ponds aren't completely still or closed, slow flow via creek or canal.
Our what-could-we-do is based as much as we can on what-has-been-done; the other sweet spot for animal protein is pigs and chickens in backyards. Pity about the zoonoses.
A *whole lot* of sustainable systems depended on being much smaller than the unmanaged wild. (E.g., diverting all of the local stream, to scale up carp production as much as possible, would only have worked for a few places on the channel, because one tends to poison the next.) The idea of complete management at the intensity we seem to need, everywhere, with all the systems at once, is terrifying. (But less terrifying than intensity without management.) What was the survival rate for the first dialysis patients? Why aren't we continuing the Biosphere experiments? Wouldn't I have been happier as a bio-ignorant techie?
I really want backyard hens, but they're not compatible with having our dog in rhe back yard.
The optimal backyard run has an optimal dog protecting it, but those are rare dogs.
It's not unlikely she'd be protective of our chickens, but she also might like terrorizing them. Lee has shown zero interest in chickens, so this isn't a near-term plan or anything, just a dream. This year I'll stick to making a raised veggie bed and probably leave it at that. We do get our eggs from a local farm, though. I never really liked eggs until I started eating fresh ones.
I also want backyard chickens but the pond sounds nice.
182: A friend of my Dad raised crayfish in backyard tanks made from a recycled petrol tanker tank cut in half lengthways. It impressed the hell out of me when I was nine or so.
192: I have heard that is very easy.
At the risk of sounding like Emerson (PBUH), carp are pretty useful food fish. Feed them any old crap, keep them in muddy ponds.
On more careful reading, pwnd by LW above.
The pond at our previous flat in London had a couple of hundred* huge carp in it. You'd never have believed a pond that small or that shallow could have sustained that density of fish.
* we know because they drained it for maintenance, captured all the fish and kept them (under guard) in a big paddling pool while they cleaned the pond.
My wife's parents (rural Bohemia) keep a ton of chickens, and occasionally (although not for a while) a pig. Her granny used to raise rabbits, too, for eating.
I have very vague plans (and lots of silly puns) for 'free range organic' snails. I might start collecting them this summer if I figure out which ones are tasty.
Eventually my phone will remember my name.
190: Are you planning to do anything special with the raised beds? Maybe a keyhole garden?
I can't wait until we have a more permanent living situation (hopefully this summer?) so that I can grow veggies again.
199: Nothing very interesting. It'll be small, less than 2 feet by 3 feet, and I'll probably do some flavor of square foot gardening. I just want to use soil from elsewhere because I'm trying to be vigilant about lead contamination, though raising the bed should also help keep the dog out and maybe make it easier for the girls to do their own planting. Last year we did sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, a strawberry plant the dog dug up, horseradish I need to dig out before it spreads, and we got one eggplant. This year we'll actually have a strategy.
This thread is annoying in the way previous threads on fisheries collapse have been, in that a lot of people treat "fish" as this single undifferentiated category and frame the question from the consumer standpoint as "Fish: Yes or no?" If you put it that way, then the answer should probably be "no"; if you're not willing to put the effort into telling the difference between different types of fish and keeping track of which ones are more and less problematic, which seems to be the case for a lot of people, then it probably is best to just avoid all fish entirely. This seems to be Halford's approach, which is fine.
But all fish species are of course not actually the same; some are on the verge of collapse, others are doing fine (either being farmed in an environmentally responsible manner or being wild-caught through a well-regulated and sustainable fishery), and still others we have no idea about because to a first approximation we still know nothing about the oceans. So I don't think avoiding all fish is necessarily the only responsible option. And as gswift says, the Alaska fisheries are generally pretty well managed, though again this varies by species and other factors.
About half of the fish caught in US waters comes from the Bering Sea, btw, so if a fish is labeled as coming from Alaska it probably does. Obviously not all fish sold in the US is caught in US waters, but for the species that are found in Alaska there's a high probability that any given fish in a market came from here.
201: wait, you're not arguing with me at all. False advertising!
I wrote that comment before the other one.
Maine lobster is managed pretty well at this point, I believe.
The TV tells me Alaskan fish is super dangerous.
Actually, you know what? I don't care. I'm going to read instead.
Oh, it's a hugely dangerous occupation, no question. But we were talking about the fish, not the fisherman.
207: Probably a good idea. I didn't actually want to argue with you.
205: I thought they thought that for a few years, but now they're less sure. Anyway, one thing Halford was certainly right about was the relative ease of regulating an industry, like lobstering in Maine, that's located within our own borders/waters.
209: yeah. Anyway, I just remembered that I have to give a talk tomorrow to a bunch of eighth-grade teachers, so I should probably deal with that and then read.
I'm going to read instead.
Is this where I mention that I've finally gotten around to reading The Warmth of Other Suns? I have two main reactions: 1) holy cow this book is amazing and b) fuck this fucking country.
Anyway, one thing Halford was certainly right about was the relative ease of regulating an industry, like lobstering in Maine, that's located within our own borders/waters.
Right, and the same thing applies to Alaska, of course. More to the anadromous fisheries that are managed by the state than to the offshore ones that are managed by the feds, but both are way better regulated than international waters, which is where the really serious collapses are happening.
212: it's a great book: beautifully written, beautifully narrated, beautifully executed. As I said in one of Tedra's threads recently, I found myself, on nearly every page, wishing I had the chops to pull off something like that. Sigh.
This talk, on the other hand, is pretty boring. Sorry, eighth-grade teachers! You have shit jobs (said with allusive tongue in allusive cheek), and now your weekend sucks too!
What are you lecturing the teachers on?
Civil War sesquicentennial stuff. Sort of a bird's-eye view of the fights over CW memory after the war, at the 50th anniversary, at the centennial, and now. They'll probably like it well enough -- unless they get annoyed that I'm talking about race -- but I'm bored by it at this point.
That actually sounds like a pretty interesting talk to me.
You're welcome to attend. It's a long trip, sure, and I might not let you leave -- press-ganged into a PhD program, teo toiled away the next six years of his life on a dissertation comparing salmon fisheries and commercial feedlots -- but the weather is supposed to be great for the next few days.
I think I'll give it a miss, thanks. I'm still recovering from my trip to the Interior this week.
Back to the fish topic, here's an interesting story showing just how complicated it all is even in Alaska.
But we were talking about the fish, not the fisherman.
A diet based primarily on Alaskan fishermen is sustainable as long as unemployment stays above 7%, but you certainly couldn't feed an entire nation on it.
Anyway, Halford's basically right.
Oh yeah. That's what I always think!! Now, I'm doing the "these nuts in your face" dance around my life-size voodoo doll of VW that I keep in my bedroom. But not in a creepy way.
I mean, no one should find a sexy dance of dominance creepy, except maybe prudes.
200: What about using grow bags? I might make some to plant at a friend's house.
201. Yes. In Europe they're now telling us not to eat mackerel, because of overfishing. Ten years ago this would have been like saying you can't eat rats because they're nearly extinct. On the other hand, they're suggesting we switch to herring, which was a total no-no in the late 20th century, but seems to have completely recovered.
212: I second the breathless endorsement of The Warmth of other Suns. Phenomenal book. I was reminded of a passage in it during the thread about segregation at Las Vegas casinos the other day.
Over at Rottin' in Denmark ( sort of an honorary FPP in my mind) he recently discussed "Slavery by Another Name" by Blackmon which sounds like a good complement to "Warmth". Sounds like both are worth a read.
Thanks to Josh and KR for reminding me of that book. I've had it on my Kindle for ages and keep not reading it.
Also, who was it here who recommended the Frank Schaeffer book, Crazy for God? Thanks to that person too. I tore through that one.
||
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition
This is a mind-bogglingly stupid article.
>
229: I've got a copy of that, but I think I'll probably need to take a little time after Warmth so's I don't hate this country too much.
230: As VW mentioned, it's a beautifully-written book and I'm tearing through it. But I do keep needing to take breaks because it's simultaneously so heartbreaking and so very, very angering.
from 231:
"Anything that comes out of that camera is a political document. If I take a shot of the carpet, that's a political document."
Nice try dude, but no.
I can't even begin to list all the ways in which there are simple errors of fact in that article.*
There are so many that the simplest explanation is that the two 'artists' are charlatans who are telling deliberate lies, or engaged in some sort of conceptual provocation where they know their claims to be false. Otherwise, they are morons.
* not that there might not be interesting points to be made about race, photography, and technology. They just aren't being made there.
229: PBS did a documentary based on it that was fantastic. (Full disclosure: a relative of mine who works in the field is interviewed in it, but it's not as if she knows me or anything.) I think it was the best Black History Month piece we saw, and we watched a lot last year.
226: That's definitely an option, too. I'm trying to start small this year, especially after last year's drought, but I also put our garden on the historic neighborhood walking garden tour because the reward is someone will research the history of our house and its owners, so I need to make things look nice. Our selling point is that it's a family garden (and we're this year's "garden in progress") so I'll probably let the girls choose a lot of the foods and annuals again so they can talk to people about what they like and why.
234: The only hits for black skin absorbing 42% more light are either from this story or people talking about this story, but the sad part is that people are talking about this story.
re: 236
I'm fairly sure that the people involved are just making things up. The idea that you could even quantify the difference in levels of reflected light as precisely as 42% when using categories as broad (and thus obviously covering a vast range of skin tones in both groups) as 'black' and 'white' is obviously arrant nonsense.
I'm certain even the 42% figure doesn't pass muster as a number drawn from photographic practice. So even if they were making a very broad generalisation, the claim would be completely false. General rules of thumb when exposing for different skin types (very dark, versus very pale) give numbers in the hundreds of percent. You are talking a couple of 'stops' of difference at least, and each stop is a doubling of the amount of exposure given. A 42% difference is small enough that it'd fall within the margin of error for most film, ffs. Even old film with shitty exposure latitude.
And, to continue ranting, camera meters aren't set up for skin tones at all. If you were metering directly off of pale skin (e.g. average not-tanned northern European skin) your camera would give you the wrong exposure just as much as if you were metering directly off of dark skin.
237: It was so obviously ludicrous that I felt the need to google to see if they were just making it up or were bending some actual data. And it seems that my first guess was the right one.
Yeah, it's embarrassing for the newspaper that they ran it, and I'm sure the charlatans involved are having a good laugh while increasing their public profile as 'artists'.
There's so much weird guff color theory running around in (oil) painting classes that I wouldn't rule out institutional stupidity in the photography. That, in turn, doesn't rule out charlatanry.
Small, portable, renters' gardens: I have had *such* success with subirrigation reservoir pots made out of nested 5gallon buckets. The lack of water stress is very helpful (for plant and gardener). I don't even use the watering pipe or drain grate, and if you're friendly to restaurants, you can get a lot of buckets for free. For a right big tomato, or corn, you need something larger.
They do look no-how from the front, so either some trailing plants or some attractive low pots toward the admiring side is nice.
They do look no-how from the front, so either some trailing plants or some attractive low pots toward the admiring side is nice.
I'm enjoying this sentence for being evocative and clear in a way that I never would have imagined.
I think 'is' is the wrong conjugation, reading it again.
It might be at that. Still "no-how" is a winner. And I'm quite taken with "admiring side".
