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The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

hakaimagazine.com

111–120 of 179 posts

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#111

Funny that we have certain collective nouns that don't cross meat types. -- Fish sticks -- Chicken nuggets or fingers -- Shrimp poppers And beef / pork don't seem to ever fall into those. (pork sticks?? Beef nuggets??) Maybe because beef, pork seem worthy of preserving identity as a piece of a distinguishable reputable whole parent, while fish, chicken, are sometimes almost.... um, extruded and need a noun of their o…

Fwiw - in Ireland & UK, they're fish fingers, not fish sticks.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#112

Funny that we have certain collective nouns that don't cross meat types. -- Fish sticks -- Chicken nuggets or fingers -- Shrimp poppers And beef / pork don't seem to ever fall into those. (pork sticks?? Beef nuggets??) Maybe because beef, pork seem worthy of preserving identity as a piece of a distinguishable reputable whole parent, while fish, chicken, are sometimes almost.... um, extruded and need a noun of their o…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_steaks

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#113
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That beef number is going to vary widely. The low end might be grass-fed beef on rotational grazing regenerative grassland fed a methane suppressing supplement versus beef raised on factory farmed corn grown on land created by burning down the rain forest.

I thought the methane from decomposing grass was net generated whether it passed through the cow or not?

Most beef aren't fed grass, they're fed corn or barley or other grains.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#114

Funny that we have certain collective nouns that don't cross meat types. -- Fish sticks -- Chicken nuggets or fingers -- Shrimp poppers And beef / pork don't seem to ever fall into those. (pork sticks?? Beef nuggets??) Maybe because beef, pork seem worthy of preserving identity as a piece of a distinguishable reputable whole parent, while fish, chicken, are sometimes almost.... um, extruded and need a noun of their o…

Fwiw - in Ireland & UK, they're fish fingers, not fish sticks.

Interesting -- for the US "fingers" is reserved for breaded frozen meat that appears to be hand-formed (that is, not rectangular, but still likely machine-made at scale). Chicken fingers and fish fingers are commonly available.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#115
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I phrased this quite poorly; my quibble isn't with the concept of scaling or that it's possible to fish sustainably at some defined scale. I was getting at the idea that most people's definition of doing something _at scale_ is going to be well above the tipping point, in the same way that processing data _at scale_ usually invokes rows of server racks, and not a single thread on a dinky laptop.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#116
post #39
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…

> methane decomposes to CO2 in atmosphere in a decade or two, which is then captured by grass

But methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so it's not neutral at all.

You're also assuming that cattle are fed naturally occurring grass rather than industrial livestock feed, which I don't have numbers for but I assume is not carbon-neutral.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth should adults care what shape their food is? The childish thing is judging adults by completely substanceless distinctions like this.

Asking why this should be the case is not particularly useful. The fact is that it is true. If you offer an average adult cereal in the shape of little ronald mcdonald faces vs. generic flakes even with identical nutritional content they will, on average, select the more 'adult appropriate' option. Marketing is a thing for a reason.

[deleted]

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#118
post #65
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncomfortable reality is that there is almost no “sustainable” anything at our current population scale. Certainly not at anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle.

I think this is a cop out that needlessly encourages people to not try to find sustainable solutions. Yes, the road to sustainability is hard and long, but a path does exist that achieves sustainability without population reduction. Discouraging people from seeking that path does nobody any good.

Can we improve things? Sure. Should we invest in improving things? Absolutely.

Neither of those permits the kind of pervasive magical thinking people have where we can somehow raise even a fraction of our 7 billion people to anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle without further accelerating environmental collapse. Or even maintaining the number of people with such a lifestyle that we currently do.

Our planet fundamentally lacks the resources for sustained consumption anywhere near the scale we're operating at, no matter how green we try to make things. Even just on a purely thermodynamic level we're running out of energy budget without overheating the planet[1]. And that's completely ignoring greenhouse gases.

[1]: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think The Cove ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cove_(film) ) had a lot to do with raising (negative) awareness of dolphin fishing in Japan.

Also see: epicanthic folds. You've heard of the killing of dolphins by Japanese fishermen, but not of the similar practice of killing of pilot whales in the Faroe islands where people are distinctly not of Asian descent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Faroe_Islands

Maybe that's got more to do with the fact that the Faroe Islands have a population of 52,000 while Japan's population is 125,410,000? Surely the fishing practices of the nation 2400x larger are going to be more impactful by at least an order of magnitude or two.

Edit: We don't have to guess. Using 1986 numbers since this is when I remember the world being peak-Save-The-Whales (Star Trek IV's release year). Admittedly if you use current numbers they're closer, but that's because Japan's fishing output has decreased dramatically. That decrease is due to exhaustion of its fishing grounds; their fishing practices i.e. square milage of nets it's putting in the water each day remain mostly unchanged.

Faroe - 355,000 metric tons fished in 1986

Japan - 12,750,000 metric tons fished in 1986

Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/faroe-islands/total-fisheries-p... and corresponding Japan page.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#120
"The fishing industry tried selling the blocks whole, as fishbricks."

Now that sounds unappealing.

But fishsticks were always great as a kid.

I don't know why it isn't mentioned that they were good for dipping. You could dip them in tartar sauce, inferior to british fish and chips, but kids didn't mind, they were even amenable to ketchup or mayonnaise.

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