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The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

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Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#51

Post by cheese_goddess »

> In 1953, 13 companies produced 3.4 million kilograms of fish sticks. A year later, four million kilograms were produced by another 55 companies. This surge in popularity was partly due to a marketing push that stressed the convenience of the new food: “no bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss,” as one Birds Eye advertisement proclaimed.

A dirty lie, at least when it comes to "no waste", when you consider that the skin, head and tail of the fish, or about 1/3 of its edible tissue, is thrown away as garbage, and lucky if it's made into pet food.

This is the convenience and advantage of rearing entire generations on food that doesn't look like food: that they never wonder what happened to the rest of the animal.

No respect for an other living thing.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#52

Post by narag »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #51

> In 1953, 13 companies produced 3.4 million kilograms of fish sticks. A year later, four million kilograms were produced by another 55 companies. This surge in popularity was partly due to a marketing push that stressed the convenience of the new food: “no bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss,” as one Birds Eye advertisement proclaimed. A dirty lie, at least when it comes to "no waste", when you consider that the skin…

Is that what it means? I take that as "you won't need to dispose of waste"...

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#53

Post by lostlogin »

xyzzyz wrote: post #39
sampo wrote: post #21

> Each kilogram of fish sticks produces about 1.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide, which “rivals the climate impact of tofu,” she says. Beef, by comparison, produces over 100 times that amount of carbon dioxide per kilogram. These estimates vary a lot from one source to another, but even then 130 kgCO2/kg is an unusually high estimate for beef. Common range, I think, is from 20 to 60. For example this estimate is 26 [1]…

This also depends on what you count as carbon dioxide production. For example, cattle produce methane through gut fermentation, which is a strong greenhouse gas. However, it contributes to warming only to the extent the cattle stocks are growing. If cattle numbers are stable for some amount of time, than the methane produced by them does not contribute to new warming, as it forms closed cycle: methane decomposes to C…

Can’t you apply this logic to other things too though? We have two ICE cars for the household, and as long as that remains stable the CO2 produced will be used by the plants in our garden.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#54

Post by frosted-flakes »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #11
ojhughes wrote: post #7

Another thing British and Americans have a different name for. We call them fish fingers. If you ask for fish sticks in the UK you will probably get the pinkish crab sticks that don’t have breadcrumbs

Indeed. Although I'm mostly aware of the American equivalents of British terms, in this case it caught me off guard. Seeing the headline I had no idea what it was talking about, and I thought it might mean "fish sticks" as in fishing using spears! I wonder what my American counterpart might have thought if the headline used "fish fingers" instead... maybe that the article was about the unlikely evolutionary success o…

Chicken prepared in a similar manner is called chicken fingers in the US, and at least in Canada, "fish fingers" sounds entirely natural and is not something I would even blink at. I don't even know what they're labelled as on packages; probably a mixture of both.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#55

Post by cheese_goddess »

narag wrote: post #52
cheese_goddess wrote: post #51

> In 1953, 13 companies produced 3.4 million kilograms of fish sticks. A year later, four million kilograms were produced by another 55 companies. This surge in popularity was partly due to a marketing push that stressed the convenience of the new food: “no bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss,” as one Birds Eye advertisement proclaimed. A dirty lie, at least when it comes to "no waste", when you consider that the skin…

Is that what it means? I take that as "you won't need to dispose of waste"...

Sure, someone else will do the dirty job for "you". Food waste as a service.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#56

Post by oblio »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #51

> In 1953, 13 companies produced 3.4 million kilograms of fish sticks. A year later, four million kilograms were produced by another 55 companies. This surge in popularity was partly due to a marketing push that stressed the convenience of the new food: “no bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss,” as one Birds Eye advertisement proclaimed. A dirty lie, at least when it comes to "no waste", when you consider that the skin…

Well, the upside is that if some time before we make cold fusion a reality we are able to make safe, nutritious and cheap artificial meat & co., at least it's going to be more easily accepted by folks that won't expect to also see the other body parts.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#57

Post by shkkmo »

tashoecraft wrote: post #25
flakiness wrote: post #2

As a someone who came from a fish-eating nation (Japan), it's great to know that fish sticks are sustainable. The collective memory there was that Japan was condemned as fish abuser. People felt unfair but also were ashamed at the same time. (Over-fishing was/is at least partly true after all.) However, I don't have any memory around fish sticks associated from my childhood in Japan. Fried (frozen) fish fillets are p…

If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale. In order to catch this much fish, you're going to kill tons of other animals, discard tons of nets and other fishing equipment, saying it's "sustainable" is probably a lie in most every sense.

I think that there is some confusion as to what you are trying to say.

1) There is no way to catch the amount of fish we catch in a sustainable manner. (No sustainability at our current scale.)

2) There is no way to catch any amount of fish sustainably. (No sustainability at any scale.)

I think people are intrepreting you as saying #2 when you are really saying #1.

The answer would appear to be that if that we need to reduce the scale at which fiahing operates. This means sustainability requirents that increase the costs to fishermen so that overall demand cam be curbed to a sustainable level.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#58

Post by narag »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #55
narag wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what it means? I take that as "you won't need to dispose of waste"...

Sure, someone else will do the dirty job for "you". Food waste as a service.

In 1953 I seriously doubt there was so much concern about it, much less in an advertisment directed to consumers.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#59

Post by shkkmo »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #41
Enginerrrd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale This statement is silly. There is A scale at which fishing is sustainable. The issue is that we are likely well over that.

This is like saying your amazing lock-free architecture is scalable, as long as you define scalable to mean "at most one thread."

Huh? Just because something is scalable, doesn't mean it is scalable indefinitely.

There very clearly exists a scale at which fishing is sustainable and a scale at which it is not. You can argue what the tipping point is, but you can't argue with that fundemental premise.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#60

Post by hoopleheaded »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #55
narag wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what it means? I take that as "you won't need to dispose of waste"...

Sure, someone else will do the dirty job for "you". Food waste as a service.

If those bits were removed in homes they are almost always going to be wasted without municipal composting, and even that is still wasteful. If they are removed at scale (no pun intended) there is a much higher likelihood that they will be used as a byproduct in pet food or fertilizer or something.
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