By Jim Field
A while back (August 14) the NYTimes editorial staff wrote a short piece about a website called "Gargagefish.com," which you can go to by clicking here. (It's really funny, you have to look at it. Go to bottom of this post for a picture from their site that they refer to as the inspiration behind their idea.) The editorial, copied below, summarizes the setup well, so I won't replicate what's been said.
Except....that the word is getting out about over-fishing by everyone: commercial fisherman, charter boats, and private recreational fisherman--each on their own missions to maximize their catch to the detriment of the oceans and common interests. Also, there's shared conversation about the "fish of the month" phenomenon, whereby certain species appear on restaurant menus only to soon disappear after they're harvested into oblivion. Hopefully, people are beginning to listen. As for me (a do-gooder), I have stopped eating fish in restaurants: the stuff is typically old and frozen; they cook it poorly; and the fish being served is endangered (e.g., strippers, sea bass). So I opt for steak/pork/chicken instead--heck, we've got an unlimited supply of this stuff. Crazy, crazy practices going on in the fishing world.
Dan and I were joking, last time out on the blue together, that sea robin someday soon will soon show up on menus. Could be sooner than we think!
Editorial Notebook
The Ugliest Catch
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
The second annual Garbagefish.com fishing tournament is over. Carmen, Joe and Rocco are the first-place winners, respectively, in the three divisions: sea robin, dogfish and skate.
For the unfamiliar: A sea robin is a rusty-colored fish with a skull-helmet of a head, bulging eyeballs, a maw like a wide-mouth jar, winglike fins and whiskery appendages that it uses to prowl the bottom, where it snaps up baited hooks, earning a very short visit to the boat or dock. The visit is short because fishermen take one look and throw it back. A dogfish looks like a toy rubber shark, and is about as appetizing. A skate is a smallish ray. While its wings are good sautéed in brown butter, cleaning and skinning are a chore, and catching one is generally not a prideful moment.
Garbagefish.com, run by some rude and witty New Jersey fishermen, is dedicated to the proposition that all edible fish are created equal — that the way to salvage the dignity of catching sea robins and not striped bass is to pretend you meant to do that. And then to cook, not trash, your catch: Sea robin, ugly up front, is tasty in back, where it’s all meaty, tender tail. Skate you know about. Dogfish, properly prepared, doesn’t have to be disgusting: it’s the fish in fish and chips.
The site also claims to promote ecological balance, arguing that it’s good to catch more of the unregulated uglies, to keep them from scarfing up too many babies of sexier species. “The day they place limits on sea robin,” it says, “is the day you are catching a hell of a lot more fluke.”
More likely, the day they place limits on sea robin is the day they, too, have finally begun the slide to oblivion.
The problem no Web site can solve is the voracity of the oceans’ top predator. Go to fishing bulletin boards and blogs and you will see them, the guys who boast of massacring the stripers and the bluefish and the cod and maxing out their limits on every trip. Or go on one of the party boats that trail a slick of cigarette butts and leave no legal-size fluke behind. Add poachers to the mix, and saltwater recreational fishing can seem like an orgy of waste and depredation.
The worst fate, for a fish, is to be loved or feared — a tuna or a shark. Until humans manage their appetites, the happiest way for other species to be is to be left alone on the bottom, ugly and unloved.
Finally, this picture from their site supposedly gave them the idea for their tournament. I assume they got tired of getting skunked while fishing for "attractive" fish, and so they shifted their focus to less popular, but more abundant "ugly" species.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment