Greater Tuna Quotes

The various seafood guides usually rank farmed fish based on safety for consumers as well as on environmental impacts. Currently, it’s really hard to find out where or how animals were raised, what they have consumed that you don’t want to have as a part of you, or how long they have been sitting in storage, accumulating things you also do not want to have as a part of you. What most guides do not tell you is whether the fish are plant-eaters or carnivores, nor do you learn their likely age, and these things matter a lot for two reasons. The higher up the food chain, and the older the animal, the greater the concentration of contaminants: tuna, shark, swordfish, halibut, and in fact, most of the fish in the counter fit into this category. It takes a much greater investment from the ecosystem, pound for pound, to make a ten-year-old fish-eating tuna than a one-year-old plant-eating catfish. For those who want to eat low on the food chain with lowest risk of contaminants, farmed catfish, tilapia, carp, and certain mollusks are the best choices, but even so, it makes a difference where and how they were raised.

take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed — gratuitously — while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale. Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

In the half darkness, piles of fish rose on either side of him, and the pungent stink of fish guts assaulted his nostrils. On his left hung a whole tuna, its side notched to the spine to show the quality of the flesh. On his right a pile of huge pesce spada, swordfish, lay tumbled together in a crate, their swords protruding lethally to catch the legs of unwary passersby. And on a long marble slab in front of him, on a heap of crushed ice dotted here and there with bright yellow lemons, where the shellfish and smaller fry. There were ricco di mare---sea urchins---in abundance, and oysters, too, but there were also more exotic delicacies---polpi, octopus; aragosti, clawless crayfish; datteri di mare, sea dates; and grancevole, soft-shelled spider crabs, still alive and kept in a bucket to prevent them from making their escape. Bruno also recognized tartufo di mare, the so-called sea truffle, and, right at the back, an even greater prize: a heap of gleaming cicale. Cicale are a cross between a large prawn and a small lobster, with long, slender front claws. Traditionally, they are eaten on the harbor front, fresh from the boat. First their backs are split open. Then they are marinated for an hour or so in olive oil, bread crumbs, salt, and plenty of black pepper, before being grilled over very hot embers. When you have pulled them from the embers with your fingers, you spread the charred, butterfly-shaped shell open and guzzle the meat col bacio----"with a kiss," leaving you with a glistening mustache of smoky olive oil, greasy fingers, and a tingling tongue from licking the last peppery crevices of the shell. Bruno asked politely if he could handle some of the produce. The old man in charge of the display waved him on. He would have expected nothing less. Bruno raised a cicala to his nose and sniffed. It smelled of ozone, seaweed, saltwater, and that indefinable reek of ocean coldness that flavors all the freshest seafood. He nodded. It was perfect.

An article in this month’s National Geographic magazine quotes a scientist referring to the “undistractibility” of these animals on their journeys. “An arctic tern on its way from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, for instance, will ignore a nice smelly herring offered from a bird-watcher’s boat in Monterey Bay. Local gulls will dive voraciously for such handouts, while the tern flies on. Why?” The article’s author, David Quammen, attempts an answer, saying “the arctic tern resists distraction because it is driven at that moment by an instinctive sense of something we humans find admirable: larger purpose.” In the same article, biologist Hugh Dingle notes that these migratory patterns reveal five shared characteristics: the journeys take the animals outside their natural habitat; they follow a straight path and do not zigzag; they involve advance preparation, such as overfeeding; they require careful allocations of energy; and finally, “migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside.” In other words, they are pilgrims with a purpose. In the case of the arctic tern, whose journey is 28,000 miles, “it senses it can eat later.” It can rest later. It can mate later. Its implacable focus is the journey; its singular intent is arrival. Elephants, snakes, sea snakes, sea turtles, myriad species of birds, butterflies, whales, dolphins, bison, bees, insects, antelopes, wildebeests, eels, great white sharks, tree frogs, dragon flies, crabs, Pacific blue tuna, bats, and even microorganisms – all of them have distinct migratory patterns, and all of them congregate in a special place, even if, as individuals, they have never been there before. -Hamza Yusuf on the Hajj of Community

One example of the Prevention Paradox occurs in the first weeks when people with high LDL or “bad” cholesterol start taking fish oil supplements. Researchers found that using fish oil (which is high in omega-3 fatty acids from mackerel, herring, tuna, halibut, salmon, cod liver, and even whale blubber) is associated with a wide range of changes in LDL levels across the population, from down by 50 percent to up by a whopping increase of 87 percent.6 Researchers have dug deeper to demonstrate that people who supplemented their diets with the so-called healthy fats found in fish oil actually had a greater negative change in their cholesterol levels if they were carriers of a gene variant called APOE4. Meaning that supplementing with fish oil may be good for some and very bad for other people’s cholesterol levels depending on which genes they’ve inherited.

farm-raised salmon contains lower levels of omega–3 fatty acids and astaxanthin, and higher levels of PCBs, dioxins, methylmercury, and organochlorine pesticides. As a rule of thumb, the vast majority (greater than 99 percent) of “Atlantic salmon” available in the world’s market is farmed, whereas the majority (greater than 80 percent) of “Pacific salmon” is wild-caught. I recommend Alaskan wild salmon because it is the least contaminated; it is more expensive but may be well worth the price. Canned Alaskan wild salmon may be more affordable, and has a lot less contaminants than most other canned fish. One FDA study found that the average methylmercury level of canned albacore tuna (so-called “solid white tuna”) was 35 times higher than that found in canned wild salmon. I recommend eating a 4- to 6-oz fillet of wild Alaskan salmon twice a week. This can get expensive so look for them in freeze packs or in a can for the same health benefits.