Sustainable fish that are good for you
By Russ Parson, Los Angeles Times
Sustainable seafood is one of the big buzzwords in food these days. And it is important: So many of our most popular fish are close to being overfished. The trick is expanding our palates, finding fish that we aren’t already loving to death.
But finding alternatives is daunting – most of us didn’t grow up with great markets, so the range of fish we know is limited. Still, there are great fish out there. So I put the question to a panel of seafood experts at Saturday morning’s “Field to Fork” segment of the Taste: What one fish would you want to put in people’s hands that is both sustainable and delicious?
Lisa Hogan, a vice president of Santa Monica Seafood – one of the leading seafood wholesalers on the West Coast – chose Santa Barbara spot prawns. They’re trapped off the Southern California coast and sold live from tanks. “They are so sweet and so delicious,” she said. “I guarantee you that once you taste these, you’ll never go back to farmed tiger or white shrimp again. They’re just amazing.”
YOU ARE RIGHT Unfortunately the majority of people tend to believe that what is rare, is better. I can prove my point using wines. We have great wines from California vineyards available to us at cheap prices. But some people still choose to pay high prices for imported wines. They do this because they convince themselves that there is something great about wine that is rare or from another country. This, I believe, is psychological and very common. If we had great tasting fish available to us, in large quantities, at low prices, in a very short time the population would adopt the (false) idea that this fish is low quality, and less desirable. You’ll need to change how people think, and that won’t happen.