Day seventy nine

Today's victim

How long does tuna live?

New class has started today - Seafood identification and fabrication. That is very interesting, as I am not really familiar with fish. I know a little bit about seafood (crustaceans), but fish is not where I am confortable with my knowledge.

A few facts. While average food costs are declining during last decades, fish and seafood are increasing in cost. For the last 10 years cost of seafood almost doubled. Since so many varieties of fish were over catch, and some of them almost extinct, the sustainability is important part of aquaculture in developed countries (some countries do not care at all). According to international rules, each country has 200 miles zone and this zone belongs
to the country. International water is opened for everybody and there is almost no control on the fishing in the international waters.

Tuna for example. In 1950 average tuna was 400 pounds, now average tuna is less than 200 pounds. This fish has a long line span, some spices are around 100 years old. When we caught old fish, the new one is not able to grow as fast as we are fishing.

In general all this is sad. However, there are a variety of farmed fish available for consumption now.

Today we were working with striped bass (see photo). Striped bass is a round fish wich means that it has two equal sides (left and right). What is different after meat, is the product (fish) is so delicate, you do not need to use pressure at all. Very gentle movement with knife. We gutted, scaled, filleted, and skinned that fish (we had only one per person), which was not difficult at all.