We've been eating a lot of tilapia and salmon. I think it's probably farmed.
Salmon, even farm raised, has about doubled in price the last 3-4 years.
Nuh-uh. My mom sincerely thinks Lou Reed sucks.
Walk on the Wild Side is the bestest song ever.
Doo do doo do doo do do doo . . .
2: Is it really? I don't normally do the grocery shopping anymore. Apparently, I brought home too many organic cheese doodles.
The collapse of the fisheries means that fish sticks don't have any fish at all in them any more. (Just sticks.) No one noticed or cared.
Nuh-uh. My mom sincerely thinks Lou Reed sucks.
She's so vicious.
Here's a graph of commodity salmon prices over the past 30 years. A lot going on, so hard to characterize. A large U-shape bottoming in early 2000s with a lot of movement on top of that pattern. (I wonder if the decline part was due to the salmon farming industry developing?)
I wonder if you can make a paleo lox sandwich. Maybe just roll capers and cream cheese in a sheet of lox.
Fish is too (%^&^%* complicated. Overfishing? Farmed versus wild, minutae of fishing-technique variations I'm supposed to care about - troll and pole, what? Mercury? Every fish known by three different names? I 'm looking for black cod. No, wait, sablefish. No, wait, that's not actually the same thing after all!
Fuck it, I'm going to make black beans.
In fact, Wikipedia has 1996 as the year when farmed harvest exceeded wild.
Numbers per Wikipedia. Wonder if wild tonnage has gone down since 2007?
Total salmon production (tonnes):
1982
Wild 558,864 75%
Farmed 188,132 25%
2007
Wild: 992,508 31%
Farmed: 2,165,321 69%
It's all pretty dynamic. This, on land: http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/back-from-the-brink-montana-ranchers-see-record-high-cattle/article_235751b0-3f14-11e3-adbd-001a4bcf887a.html
15.table: The Neolithic Revolution comes to the sea.
I would not have expected the wild catch to have almost doubled since 1982.
17: Also see chart on upper right-hand side of this Wikipedia article.
Except hold the capers.
Capers like to cuddle.
I remember that you could get salmon on sale for $4/lb several years ago, and the cheapest I've seen in the last year is $8. Smoked salmon hasn't gone up quite that much but still significant (I think the Costco 1lb used to be about $10, now $14-$15.)
Fish has seemed to be a luxury for as long as I can remember. Maybe it's that my parents had an exaggerated view of how expensive it is, and now their view is accurate. But I've always thought fish in general was something too expensive to buy at the supermarket.
Fish is too (%^&^%* complicated.
Monterey Bay Aquarium to the rescue!
I haven't noticed much of a change at my market, except that they often have whole sardines and mackerel recently.
That index mundi site I linked in 11 has a wealth of information on commodity prices.
24: I've never seen sardines except whole.
The last 5 years for salmon have some big swings if that site is correct. A big peak in 2011, down to nearly half, and then another peak through most of this year with a very recent move to cheaper prices. Not sure how much those commodity swings come through in retail prices.
At a store, I mean. Obviously, I've seen them after I've taken a bit from one.
14 gets it right. There's also near insane lack of labeling control, so it's hard to be sure that you're comparing between prices for the same species, etc. Plus a lot of substitution -- Tilapia was a garbage fish until about 15 years ago. And the distribution network has also changed incredibly in the past 20 years -- I do live next to an ocean, but almost no fish sold here is caught locally, and the same is true for almost all major coastal US cities (with a very few species as exceptions, and New Orleans as an exception still).
At our Whole Foods yesterday they had a disconcerting amount of fresh, wild caught monkfish. It was on sale. I've never seen that much monkfish in one place before. The regular fish market never has that much.
30: Per the recommendation at 24, monkfish is a good alternative.
29: Galveston/Houston had a decent selection of local seafood when I lived there in late 70s/early 80s* but I wonder if that has held up.
*The fern bars were to die for...
27 -- Salmon is generally one of the better-managed fish; it's mostly either farmed (which provides quantity) or managed in Alaska(which probably has the best single fisheries management program in the world, not that this is saying that much) so it's not really the best tracking species for ocean collapse.
I find the Monterey aquarium site largely not useful in practice -- the fisheries are so complicated, the labeling is so untrustworthy, and the site itself has so many caveats that except for a very few species on the far ends of the totally fine/totally horrible spectrum it's not that helpful as a guide in a restaurant or supermarket. Though I gave up on fish about a year ago and haven't tried it since, so maybe it's gotten better.
33: Unfortunately shrimp seems to be the only other commodity tracked at that level.
Totally possible I'm misreading it on my phone, but it looks like that index mundi graph is also for Norweigian farm raised salmon only?
34: Has the paleo movement split? Are you an inland-paleo now?
Anyhow, the world fish market is super fascinating. My door neighbor is some sort of operative for a Japanese fish syndicate of some kind, which seems to involve lots of travel and (probably imagined by me) shadiness.
It is a little disappointing that the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis hasn't spawned a fad diet and lifestyle.
You'd think the Chimp-pig hybrid hypothesis would be more popular, since it implies we should eat like garbage dumpsters as we do now.
I understand that eating carp is going to have to be a thing, because carp are taking over all of North America's inland waterways.
a Japanese fish syndicate of some kind, which seems to involve lots of travel and (probably imagined by me) shadiness.
MARLON BRANDO
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POLPO CORLEONE
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THE CODFATHER
Basically, eat smaller cheaper fish in order to eat responsibly. I buy seafood from Korean markets, basically never at the grocery. I like mackerel, bluefish, herring, all of which are oily, wild-caught, and sustainably fished. Also, I really like squid-- grill in a basket with chorizo and pine nuts.
I understand that eating carp jellyfish is going to have to be a thing, because carp jellyfish are taking over all of North America's inland waterways.
I was at a Korean restaurant on Saturday and one of the side dishes was just a bowl of these really tiny fish. Per 44, must be sustainable even though I ate like 100 of them.
Coincidentally, it is National Seafood Month.
I love eating salmon so much and I wish it was cheaper :/
re: 46
Quite common to get fried whitebait as a starter or appetiser here.
Often spicy or salty as in:
http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes/chefs/gordon-ramsay/chilli-and-spice-whitebait-recipe
Pittsburgh's great seafood market/seafood stand Wholey's has "Smelts" among its appetizers. They are about 4 inches long. Not familiar with eating whitebait. Juveniles? How tiny are they?
51: Whoa-oh, here he comes
Watch out, smelts, he'll chew you up
Whoah-oh here he comes
He's a smelt-eater!
Composed by myself when Kai first discovered Wholey's smelts at about age 2 (maybe 1.5?) and put away a quarter pound at high speed. BOth my kids went through periods of loving smelts, and both still ike them quite a lot.
My understanding is that whitebait is similar, but even smaller.
Also, I strongly concur with the discussion of salmon prices again. It was about '97 or '98 that I discovered how absurdly cheap Canadian salmon was at Wholey's* - typically $4.99, and often on sale for $3.99. I probably ate it 3 times a month for years.
Around 2004 I came to terms with just how bad Western hemisphere salmon farming is** and stopped buying it, but I always kept an eye on the price, and it started getting pricey just a couple years later, and now it's consistently $7.99 or $8.99.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that farm-raised salmon grew the market for wild, and now wild salmon season is a (really) big thing, which it wasn't just 7-8 years ago.
Anyway, regarding other fish: I don't think any of them had the super-cheap phase farm salmon did, so price rises have been much more subtle - maybe average price a couple bucks more, from $9 to $11 for a non-exotic fillet. IOW, no real sign of scarcity.
OTOH, my understanding is that the forthcoming collapse of all fisheries is pretty much being driven by this dynamic: everything is getting caught because there's so much demand, but one day there just won't be enough fish for that, and suddenly sushi-grade tuna will be $75/lb, really just limited to the wealthy (and committed).
*it's actually just Wholey, but the standard Pittsburgh thing is to call all stores by their possessives, as if Old Man Aldi just opened up shop in the old Dodge dealership. Hard core locals call the main local chain "Giant Eagle's".
**Scottish and Norweigian are both raised in fjords where natural water currents flush away the poop, meaning that they don't need to be jacked up with antibiotics; I may actually have learned this here from ttaM
Weirdly, I just bought (what was labelled as) Atlantic cod at less than $6.00 a pound. It was "on sale" according to the nice man. Still unclear whether what we ate was actually cod, which I had thought was totally endangered at this point, but at that price, the old-timey salt-of-the-earth sea recipes in Cod begin to make sense.
Oh shut up Sifu you don't know what you're talking about.
re: 54.last
I think that's the case with some Scottish salmon, yeah. Some farms are in particularly fast flowing currents, too, so the fish are closer to wild salmon in size and density and don't suffer with lice. I watched a TV documentary about it.
I expect some other farms are just as crappy, intensive, and environmentally unfriendly as anywhere else, though.
Actually, that reminded me of why the Seafood Watch site is so useless. How is JM supposed to know where the cod was caught, if it in fact is cod, and whether the cod was caught through "hook and line" or some other method. I understand that the MBA wants to give credit to people who are using the better methods in better fisheries but from a practical point of view the site ends up being pretty useless, except for a few unambiguous species.
I used to think that salmon were beautiful majestic creatures that were part of the ecosystem and worthy of protection just for being one of Gaia's creatures.
Round about the third time my dog rolled ecstatically in one cast up on the banks after spawning, I decided at they're a pain in the ass and completely not worth it. If I could get my friend at the Department of Fish and Wildlife to put up a barrier that shuts down the whole American River run, I'd do it.
Well, it was Fairway, which is decently reputable around here. Whole Foods is really good about origins and certifications, so I wondered a bit.
You have a ways to go before you could call yourself Seafood Tweety.
If you're willing to drive about half an hour from here, you can buy fresh fall Chinook salmon directly from the members of the various tribes that have rights to the Columbia River run. It's about $8/lb (up from $2-3 10 years ago, which bears out the price escalation mentioned upthread), but that's still a bargain for incredibly delicious fish that will put you off Atlantic salmon forever.
||This entire postseason is giving me a fucking hemorrhage.|>
||This entire postseason is giving me a fucking hemorrhage.|>
srsly.
The last half-inning may have burst a few more blood vessels, what with Lester hitting for himself and the catcher trying to score on a short single with two outs.
Guys are looking pretty good right now. No idea what StL was thinking leaving Wainright in.
Yeah, I'm sure this will jinx it, but the way Lester's been pitching, how can you pull him there? Especially with the way the bullpen's been taxed lately.
Haha Ortiz infield single.
He has been pitching well, definitely. But he'd pitched six innings already. I'd think a fresh reliever would be at least as good as a starter who'd gone six innings. And one of their regular starters was available to pinch-hit.
But his pitch count like like 74; it's still only 81, an inning later. When he's pitching like that, looking like he could go 8 if not 9, you can't pull him.
This game is still too close. I want a ten run lead.
I dunno if I like this switch. Gaaaah.
What I meant to say was wooo Koji time no worries.
Lester could probably have closed it out, but man do I love watching Uehara.
Won't somebody think of cheer for the children Cardinals?
Blume's family doesn't comment here.
I'm kinda rooting for the Cards, in a very flimsily supported sort of way*.
*Ongoing bitterness about Red Sox fans being generally annoying (present company excluded, of course), but not as annoying as Yankees fans.
Perhaps the shortest game of the playoffs, too.
Grown men playing each other for the profits of a monopoly capitalists.
Displaying the universally recognized symbol of surrender seems like a peculiar way of cheering on one's favored team.
That's what that mean? Shit. People must think we're horrible.
This year's Alaska salmon harvest was the biggest on record, and the second most valuable. I think Halford's probably right, though, that salmon isn't a very good indicator of marine ecosystem health for several reasons.
*Ongoing bitterness about Red Sox fans being generally annoying
Don't be a cunt, Stanley.
You are correct Stanley. Unfortunately Cardinals fans are worse, and even more racist.
Also, this is a good World Series, apart from unfortunately taking place at all.
It was kind of fun to watch the game on BT Sport. Commercials for upcoming soccer games. And a Barclays commercial honoring soccer fans which seemed to feature a mainly stiff upper lips in the face of despair and hopelessness.
When I was watching Sox games on a pirate stream from India, I found the commercials kind of interesting. Apparently there are many put-upon Indian men whose wives and bosses and parents will not let them simply relax and watch some cricket--but luckily for them, there's a new company or satellite channel or something that will solve this problem, somehow.
soccer fans which seemed to feature a mainly stiff upper lips in the face of despair and hopelessness.
Sounds about right.
I guess I'm supporting the Cardinals. It's just hard to work up much enthusiasm. "Oh, that World Series thing again?"