Google mostly has stuff on people eating live goldfish as a stunt.
Back when I was a child I can distinctly remember that at a Fiesta supermarket in Houston in the fresh fish section which was in a small room attached to the back of the store they had a crowded tank of largish round goldfish. They also had a much larger tank of other living freshwater fish like catfish and one with lobsters(also trays of living crawfish), obviously not intended for home aquariums but for consumption. So I’m assuming the goldfish were being sold for food as well?
Fiesta had a large Mexican/Latin American and international food selection.
Whoa and I thought I knew all about Mexican food! I could swear they looked just like a large pet store goldfish though, like this one(funny enough from an article about a woman eating someone’s goldfish).
Hijack–Carp are very hearty fish, hard to kill. I used to work a a fish market in Chicago that catered to European immigrants (mostly northern European but some Italians as well) Carp was a Christmas delicacy. We’d get them in boxes, gutted and iced. You’d open the box and they’d still be flapping around albeit slowly, but it still freaked out some of the people I worked with.
Carp was the main ingredient of gefilte fish. My grandmother would go to the fish store and choose a live carp from a fish tank. Although I know this only as an old wife’s tale, the story was that carp were bottom feeders and you had to let them swim in clean water for several days to cleanse them of the sludge. At any rate the fish monger would kill the fish, skin it and filet it (saving the skin and bone for stuffing) and then grind the flesh. Then my grandmother would take it home and finish the fairly lengthy preparation. It would have been colorful with goldfish.
The size of the goldfish is a function of the small space they are confined to. When in a natural habitat, with unlimited space to grow, they can reach a pound or two, although they are relatively small as members of the carp family go. Goldfish, in outdoor ornamental ponds are typically a foot long.
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Does anybody remember that jingle they sang in their radio ads some years ago? It was one of the cutest catchy jingles I’ve heard, for an advertising ad. (If you do, I think you’ll know which one I’m thinking of.)
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I don’t understand. Just because they were kept in tanks near the edible fish, you think this means they were being sold for human consumption? Don’t you think it’s possible they were being sold as pets, but kept with the other fish to simplify life support?
I can’t see anyone bothering to eat goldfish when other, larger species are available.
I seriously doubt the grocery store would sell any kind of pets. Heath codes and all.
But I wonder if they were just feeder fish for the other fish being sold?
