This is a guest post by Joe Sarmiento, also known as @socalsalty on Twitter. Why is he salty? Joe spends lots of time on the ocean pursuing a life-long passion: fishing. Joe also writes on socalsalty: Adventures in fishing from Southern California.
What is this fish in the pic below? Hint: It is a common fish to find on a restaurant menu or at your grocery store.
Mystery Meat
Answer: It is a vermilion rockfish, aka red snapper.
In Part One of this article, I talked about a picture I had posted on Twitter and asked people to guess the meat cooked in a picture. I used this device to tell a personal story on how I came to rediscover my childhood love of fishing. In this post I wanted to illustrate something I’ve noticed about modern life that I’m trying to combat via exposing my children to fishing. Let me explain.
No one will argue that specialization has fueled the growth of modern society. By allowing everyone to find and serve their special niche in life, the overall productivity and collective output of the population has blossomed . One downside tho
ugh this progress has been the growing distance (both literally and figuratively) from the actual raising and/or procuring food to the actual meals we serve our families.
For example, domestically caught fish may exchange hands 5-6 times (internationally sourced seafood even more) before you might buy it in a package in your local grocery store.
Is there a problem here?
I have come to believe the answer is yes. I first started to become concerned by what was showing up in stores by reading an article several months ago about how in my very own hometown of Seattle, a popular grocery store was caught selling fish labeled as salmon that was in fact not salmon at all. I’ve eaten plenty of salmon in my life having grown up in the Pacific Northwest. Not all of it I caught myself, but I was amazed that people could be fooled at all by something altered to look like salmon, especially in Seattle. When I told my son Jake about this story, he couldn’t believe it either. Since first reading that article, I’ve discovered some alarming facts:
- Up to 70% of all seafood is falsely labeled
- 84% of our seafood is imported, yet only 1% is actually inspected by the FDA
The bat ray I ate in the Mystery Meat picture…apparently unscrupulous types would cookie cutter out little cylindrical sections of bat ray wings and sell them as scallops! I was proud that my son had his reaction (and accompanying incredulous look) regarding the fake salmon. It let me know that I have effectively armed him to spot this kind of deceit. It’s happened because I’ve pointed out to him the differences between real, wild caught salmon and crappy farm raised substitutes. He sees fish sitting in the market and can tell the difference (by the eyes and the smell) from the freshly caught fish we’ve caught together.
Reconnecting with our food
I think people are making a conscious effort to not just reconnect with our food, but reconnect with the offline world in general. I recently read a short study where it said that “millenials” (the generation born from the 80’s to 2000’s) value experiences more than tangible goods. The theory goes that this shift in values is an effort to balance our increasingly online lives with real world interactions. I believe further evidence of this shift is the popularity of survival shows (passive), and the Eat Local movement (more active). Personally, I’ve chosen to rediscover doing an activity (fishing) that was a large part of my life growing up, and to share this passion with my kids. It’s one thing to talk about it, but to actually share the experience of catching fish, preparing it for cooking, then cooking and serving it, I believe is a tremendously valuable experience to share with my children Jacob and Juliana. Aside from the time we spend together, they get to see firsthand, the work involved in getting a fish out of the ocean and onto our plates. What they are eating is no longer a mystery to them.
Since starting my blog, I’ve found like-minded folks across the country that are actively seeking to reconnect themselves and their children to each other and to their food via activities like fishing and hunting. If you aren’t into fishing or hunting, I would encourage you to at least plant a garden with your kids. I think these shared activities are tremendously valuable for the time it allows kids and parents to spend with each other and nature. Aside from eating fresher, better tasting food, it helps everyone understand the conditions required to successfully harvest food from nature and fosters a respect and appreciation for our environment. If everyone had the same respect for nature that a fisherman or hunter has, maybe we’d all make better choices in how we treat the world we live in.
