Road trip: The origins of tilapia
I went on a great road trip recently with a few of my girlfriends to West Point, NY to visit the family of one in our group and then on to Warwick, Rhode Island simply to eat all the lobster we could consume in a 2 hour period. We had the a GPS system and a couple of Iphones. We did not have need of the
Green Book, otherwise known as
The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide reviewed in Sunday's NY Times.
http://tinyurl.com/3923fu8
We headed north on the Garden State Parkway into NY state and up the Palisades Parkway to West Point which sits on the Hudson River in a majestic, yet bucolic setting. Over the span of the next 40 hours, we ate everything from Camembert and boursin cheese, sourdough bread, vine-ripened tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil to fresh strawberries, figs, Jersey peaches; to hummus, wheat chips to paella prepared on a BBQ grill for our late dinner. Early the next day we enjoyed breakfast on the patio of the Thayer Hotel, a faded relic of better times that we learned is soon to be revitalized, it too overlooking the Hudson River. Then around 4:40pm we headed out for a early evening picnic dinner on the grounds of the Boscobel House located on the eastern shore of the Hudson where we sipped a sparkling rose served with crab and salmon sushi followed by a grilled salmon on a bed of spinach and salad greens, no-knead bread made from scratch. Absolutely real shortbread squares, huge blackberries and raspberries were dessert as the curtain went up for the first scene of a sixties revival of the "The Taming of the Shrew." (Thanks to our hostess with the mostest and our trained dessert chef).
I won’t go into everything that was available for breakfast on our last day --- only that my special indulgence was a fried green tomato with white cheese, avocado and salsa on a open-fired grilled corn tortilla. It was delish, as was everything we had. Maybe I should call this a food trip rather than a road trip.
To get to my point, over breakfast, at the Thayer a discussion began about tilapia, its origin and its nutritional value. I cannot recall the exact way the conversation began. But I, in response to another statement, said it was not good to eat farmed fish and definitely not good to eat it more than once per week. I also stated that tilapia was a bred fish suggesting that it didn't occur naturally in nature. This contradicted parts of my friend’s statement that the farming practices of Wegman’s were improving and that she thought it was all right to eat farmed fish. I clung to the opinion that this was not a good idea because in the ponds, the fish eat their own feces and whatever bacteria is in their environment. And that many of the waters in Vietnam and the Far East where the shrimp come from are undeniably polluted. But later I wondered where I had gotten that opinion.
So this morning when I went to Wegman’s, it was early and I had the opportunity to ask the Fish Manager about the origin of Wegman's tilapia. The Manager stated Wegmans does have a sustainable way that it farms it shrimp in Belize and Vietnam. They use a funnel method of aquaculture so that the feces of the fish drains down and can be skimmed from the pond thereby providing fish that are clean, with low level mercury, and primarily vegetarian fed fish. As to my other claim that tilapia is not a real fish, well that is kind of not true and true. Turns out tilapia is the genus for many fish. The Fish Manager described tilapia as the fish that Christ fed to the multitudes. Wikipedia refers to the story of St. Peter’s fish with the schekel in its mouth in Matthew 17. Someone else said it was a perch.
The reality is tilapia farming, according to multiple sources, dates back 4000 years to the Nile. I distinctly remember first hearing about tilapia farming in the Bronx, New York in the 1980's and this is the origin of my belief that tilapia do not occur naturally in nature because they were growing them in the Bronx. Of course that does not mean that these fish are being genetically engineered but it does mean that they are definitely hybridized. I understand now that because of growth in the world's population, aquaculture for tilapia and other fish will continue to grow because of the enormous need to feed the world www.cals.cornell.edu/polson/faawhitepaper.pdf. They are successful aquaculture fish, according to an MIT white paper, because they are hardy and easy to grow, white-fleshed, mild-flavored, and appeal to the palate of consumers. So it's safe to say that we will all be eating more farmed fish and shrimp in the future.
How much tilapia do you eat per week or month? What is your feeling about farmed fish and shrimp? Can you taste a difference?
