Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

hakaimagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 179 posts

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#131

Post by jiofih »

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.

You must have missed the part saying that most fish sticks use farmed fish.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#132

Post by nimvlaj30 »

dweekly wrote: post #40

This made me curious about how it was that Clarence Birdseye came to discover the fast-freeze approach that preserves flavor. The answer is surprisingly straightforward - he was a fur trader in Labrador (northern Canada) and noticed when he pulled fish out they froze immediately and were still delicious months later. So if only you could make fish as cold as northern Canada, you could make frozen fish tasty! It was f…

Sounds like he was inspired to try that by the food company of the same name

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#133

Post by shkkmo »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #115
shkkmo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Scalability" means that you can adjust the scale at which you are operating.

The definition of "At scale" just means operating at whatever is a sufficient scale to solve the problem at hand. If you only need one dinky laptop to solve the problem, you can operate at scale with a dinky laptop.

So "fishing at scale" is fishing at a scale that statisfies the demand for fish. Since demand for fish will drop as sustainabile fishing regulations increase costs, there is absolutely a way to fish at scale sustainably.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#134

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

Fishing at scale? Pun not intended (I presume).

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#135

Post by StanislavPetrov »

shkkmo wrote: post #124
stouset wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

I think you'd be surprised as how sustainabily we could approximate the western standard of living if we had the will power to try as a whole society. There would certainly be sacrifices, but I suspect we would also gain significant quality if life improvements. What this requires is a change of mindset and I don't think attitudes like yours help. We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current…

>I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument?

The argument is that its magical thinking that the earth, which has finite resources, can support an infinite number of people, if we only, "manage the resources right". Its a question of reality, not morality, but unfortunately some have a hard time separating the two concepts.

> Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument.

Nobody has to be killed off, but what we should be doing is setting as a goal sustainable population levels in the future through reproduction. This isn't to suggest people should be prevented from having children, but that our policy goals should incentive having fewer children. Right now are policies are the opposite - we offer subsidies to people to have children. What if we offered subsidies to people who didn't have any children?

Of course people will inevitably raise the straw man economic argument, "we need more young people to pay for our older people". The fact is that we have a glut of unskilled labor that is only growing due to automation and increased overpopulation. The unsustainability of our debt-based economy is, unfortunately, not a function of population and will have to be reckoned with on its own.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#136

Post by drewzero1 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #75
drewzero1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've mostly seen statistics about water usage for dairy milk production, but it takes a lot of water and food to raise a cow to maturity. Fish (if harvested sustainably) care for themselves until caught, so it makes some sense to me that planting, growing, harvesting, and processing soybeans into tofu would have similar impact to fleets of ships traveling the ocean catching fish. A few years ago I read and enjoyed th…

But presumably the fish still does need to eat, which you'd need to keep in mind for the calculation?

I don't think so, unless there is a significant amount of carbon released due to the way the fish's food grows. It's certainly not the same as running all of the machinery required to process and transport livestock feed. There has been some interesting back-and-forth about the role of the fish themselves as a natural carbon sink[1][2]. I don't pretend to understand the science or math involved in these calculations though.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabb4848 [2] https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/big-fish-sink-blue-carbo...

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#137

Post by XorNot »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #135
shkkmo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be surprised as how sustainabily we could approximate the western standard of living if we had the will power to try as a whole society. There would certainly be sacrifices, but I suspect we would also gain significant quality if life improvements. What this requires is a change of mindset and I don't think attitudes like yours help. We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current…

>I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? The argument is that its magical thinking that the earth, which has finite resources, can support an infinite number of people, if we only, "manage the resources right". Its a question of reality, not morality, but unfortunately some have a hard time separating the two concepts. > Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing co…

This is a bizarre argument to make in a world where every 1st world nation is on the cusp of negative population growth. The biggest problem we have is we have is that not enough people have access to a western lifestyle, which has been extremely effective at reducing birthrates to or below replacement levels.

Population-based sustainability arguments are a deflection from the actual hard work, which is reducing CO2 emissions and preserving ecosystems. Because they have nothing to say and no knowledge to contribute about actual sustainability, and reliably go nowhere.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#138

Post by LambdaComplex »

sweettea wrote: post #49
mr_cyborg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, I grew up with “chicken fingers” everywhere, on restaurant menus, etc. but now I can’t think of the last time I didn’t see them called “chicken tenders” outside of one regional fast food chain where I am now. I live in a different region now so I wonder if that’s a regional thing or just an overall trend

Indeed, I had never heard of a chicken tender until I started reading r/WSB; they've always been chicken fingers or buffalo wings.

Buffalo wings are something completely different though? Those are the thigh/drumstick of the chicken (which is commonly served with a spicy sauce), whereas chicken fingers/tenders are the tenderloin.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#139

Post by jonas21 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #125
jonas21 wrote: post #99

And here I am amazed that British schoolchildren in the 70s apparently ate on proper plates with cutlery.

How do kids eat in other places or at other times? I think kids eat from plates with cutlery in most of Europe both now and in the past. Do kids in the US use plastic cutlery and paper plates or something (and drink from red solo cups)?

When I was growing up (in the US), school lunch would typically be served on a disposable tray with a plastic spork. Similar to this:

https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/publ...

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#140

Post by Qub3d »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #138
sweettea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I had never heard of a chicken tender until I started reading r/WSB; they've always been chicken fingers or buffalo wings.

Buffalo wings are something completely different though? Those are the thigh/drumstick of the chicken (which is commonly served with a spicy sauce), whereas chicken fingers/tenders are the tenderloin.

Buffalo wings are actually wings. The "flat" and "drum" are both from the wing: https://www.wikihow.com/Cut-Chicken-Wings
Post reply on HN