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59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

theatlantic.com

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Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#51

Post by elliott34 »

jlgreco wrote: post #34
mapt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less convinced - sushi outside of a restaurant context, from the similarity in presentation style and selection in the DC area at least, seems to be outsourced to daily deliveries from regional suppliers

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that, I thought they usually just had the butcher or somebody throw it together in house. That was just a guess though.

well it's sold in the butcher/fresh fish section of the store, so I'm pretty sure it's prepared on site using whatever is used to supply their normal tuna. at least I hope.

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#53

Post by reneherse »

dsr_ wrote: post #45
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea is particularly interesting to myself considering my vegetarian girlfriend just made me a "Tuna Sandwhich" where the meat was substituted with soaked almonds, which actually tasted quite good and similar to the Tuna I know and love.

Chickpea salad (onions, celery, mayo) is remarkably similar to tuna salad or chicken salad made with the same additions.

Almonds, chickpeas? I love them both but they're no substitute if your diet requires a decent amount of protein.

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#54

Post by fatjokes »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #52

White Tuna has always been Escolar. There is no such thing as a "white" tuna. Even albacore is not white until cooked. Saying that white tuna is not tuna, is the same as saying Chilean Sea Bass is not a bass. While true, there is no conspiracy.

> Escolar's wax ester content can cause keriorrhea (Greek: flow of wax), gempylotoxism or gempylid fish poisoning.[4] Keriorrhea is similar to diarrhea, only the body will expel yellowish-orange drops of oil instead of liquid bowel movements.

w. t. f. O.O

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#55

Post by jlgreco »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
jlgreco wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real tuna already is expensive, but that isn't helping the fish. By the time it becomes expensive enough to actually kill demand, the species will be in terrible shape. You can't rely on supply and demand games to keep a species off the brink of extinction, we've learned this too many times the hard way. > No, it actually delays the conversion of demand by masking the cost and delaying people trying the other fish as…

> Real tuna already is expensive, but that isn't helping the fish. It isn't helping the fish because consumer demand for tuna isn't dropping, in part because consumers are insulated from the actual cost of real tuna by mislabelling; if consumer "tuna" was only real tuna (and thus, the supply was restricted to the supply of real tuna, driving the price of consumer "tuna" way up), there would be more consumer experienc…

> It isn't helping the fish because consumer demand for tuna isn't dropping, in part because consumers are insulated from the actual cost of real tuna by mislabelling; if consumer "tuna" was only real tuna (and thus, the supply was restricted to the supply of real tuna, driving the price of consumer "tuna" way up), there would be more consumer experience with tuna substitutes under their own name (rather than mislabelled as tuna), and the demand would shift to the acceptable substitutes (which clearly exist, otherwise they wouldn't be acceptable mislabelled as tuna.)

If I buy a can of shredded escolar that calls itself tuna, then I am increasing the profit margin of the fish company which may allow them to sell real tuna to people who demand real tuna at a cheaper price and remain profitable, but in reality real tuna already commands crazy prices and nobody is dropping those prices because of escolar profits.

If you restrict the supply of fish labelled tuna to 'real' tuna, then by the time the cost skyrockets to kill the demand it is already too late. Low supply is exactly what we are trying to avoid. Counting on low supply to safe the species is foolish.

> But if suppliers make more money selling escolar as "tuna", it will make it that much harder to by escolar as escolar

If they couldn't initially sell it as tuna, would they ever sell it at all? Would consumers even be aware of it?

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#57

Post by soci »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21
richardjordan wrote: post #3

The shocking depletion of the world's fisheries over the last century and a half is one of the great tragedies of our modern civilization. We're causing mass extinction on a level we have to go back to the fossil record to see. We're eating fish that was previously thrown back or used as bait, often just giving it bogus pretty names (like Chilean Sea Bass). I live in the US for now but having grown up in Europe I und…

I attribute the tragedy to the fact we farm the soil for ages, grow cattle for as much as long, but fishing was always considered cheap, given the sheer size of the ocean (we're far past the regeneration point), when in fact, fish has the biggest potential of all for intensive farming. Fish farming already is a booming industry in some countries, and the tendency is to double in the next decade. There's a lot to impr…

I've been in sea fish farms and I'm a spearfisher hobbyst myself.

Beyond the notion that fish farms are a sustainable source of fish meat, the fact is that fish farming needs a fodder supply to feed the fish. Fish eat fish, remember? This means in its majority the fodder produced nowadays comes from wild fish, probably a cheaper one to catch than de one in the farming nets. So wild fish still needs to be catched.

But it's even worse than that. Much worse... In order to grow fish in the farming nets the fish needs to eat much more than its weight in order to grow a little,just like any other animal. This means that it is much more ecological for us to eat the fish that is processed to make fish flour (fodder) than eat the fish that comes from fish farms.

What a nonsense isn't it? But still, we want tuna...

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#58

Post by shmulkey18 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
richardjordan wrote: post #3

The shocking depletion of the world's fisheries over the last century and a half is one of the great tragedies of our modern civilization. We're causing mass extinction on a level we have to go back to the fossil record to see. We're eating fish that was previously thrown back or used as bait, often just giving it bogus pretty names (like Chilean Sea Bass). I live in the US for now but having grown up in Europe I und…

The biggest challenge with fishing is the ocean is largely a shared resource. The incentive to preserve and protect is much smaller, because you can just fish in international waters or sneak over to somebody else's waters to fish, and conserving in your own waters may be fruitless because other people will come a'fishin! Basically, one giant global tragedy of the commons.

Precisely. No property rights, no desire to preserve property.

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#59

Post by GoodIntentions »

reneherse wrote: post #53
dsr_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chickpea salad (onions, celery, mayo) is remarkably similar to tuna salad or chicken salad made with the same additions.

Almonds, chickpeas? I love them both but they're no substitute if your diet requires a decent amount of protein.

Pretty sure almonds are nearly the same amount of protein per ounce as tuna..

Re: 59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna

#60

Post by jellicle »

astine wrote: post #29
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I attribute the tragedy to the fact we farm the soil for ages, grow cattle for as much as long, but fishing was always considered cheap, given the sheer size of the ocean (we're far past the regeneration point), when in fact, fish has the biggest potential of all for intensive farming. Fish farming already is a booming industry in some countries, and the tendency is to double in the next decade. There's a lot to impr…

It's worth noting that, in the United States a at least, there is a strong anti-farmed fish movement coming from the environmentalist community. They like to point out all of the damage that fish farming does to a local ecology without acknowledging the much greater damage that catching wild fish does. As a result, there is a lot of hesitation among some consumers to purchase farmed fish.

The objection is basically this: the desirable fish to farm are mostly meat-eaters. To feed these fish, large quantities of random fish are driftnetted and fed to the fish farms. That is, fish farms are converting 10 or 100 pounds of bait fish into one pound of marketable fish. This method of farming fish WORSENS the ocean depletion problem, it doesn't improve it. It would actually be better to simply fish for tuna directly.
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