Plenty of people are trying to eat healthier. Not always easy even without Covid stressors. Maybe you’re eating more vegetables or fermented foods or the panacea-of-the-week. But are you trying, specifically, to eat more fish? How’s it going?
Yes. I eat fish about 4-5 times per week. Usually canned mackerel or trout.
I’m doing my best to eat lox as often as possible. On toasted sliced baguette with honey mustard dill sauce or onion cream cheese.
They sell canned mackerel at the Dollar Tree. The quality and amount in those cans is impressive and worth well more than a lousy buck.
I eat tuna, mackerel, sardines, salmon, and herring every week. About 75% of the lunch I take to work is comprised of fish.
Good thread, OP.
What do you all do with your canned mackerel?
I’m trying to increase it, hence the thread.
Fresh fish is easy - great fried with lemon and butter, served on rice with soy and wasabi, made into fish cakes by adding Thai paste and spices with potato and breadcrumbs.
Frozen fish is more tasteless but works fine in spicy tacos and curries, and okay in cakes. I like frozen fish fillets slathered in spicy seafood sauce.
Canned fish makes good sandwiches. Never got into the habit of making croquettes.
Working on more calamari and shrimp dishes. Especially like Rhode Island style calamari. Since I am also trying to eat more veggies, which is work to me, maybe I should try making more chowders or something.
Eat in on saltines or with a little Miracle Whip/ Mayo on bread or Rye Crisps. It’s a bit dry out of the can on it’s own. Though not offensive by itself with a bit of salt and pepper,
No. I’m not
Neither is my wife.
No, fishing is unsustainable at current levels, so I won’t be increasing my consumption. I should probably increase my use of plant-based meat substitutes, though.
I get 14 fresh-caught Alaskan sockeye filets every month. Also, assorted canned salmon, tuna, sardines, etc.
Canned, frozen and fresh:
Canned mackerel or sardines: For dinner at least once a week. Toasted sandwiches, often with a little olive oil and cilantro. Goes very well with cold beer and potato chips.
Canned mussels and frozen shrimp: For lunch a couple times a month. With leek in white sauce over pasta.
Frozen whitefish: For dinner at least once a week. Thaw fillets in fridge overnight or that morning. In the evening, squeeze out water (press between palms), pat dry, dust with flour, pan fry and eat on corn tortillas with grated cabbage, onion, cilantro, Tabasco and a squirt of mayo. The last ingredient just because it’s convenient and I like it.
Frozen squid: For lunch about once a week. Thaw overnight, prepare (remove skin and guts), wash, cut body into rings and set aside. Chop onion, garlic and tomato and sauté until tender. Deglaze with white wine, add chopped parsley, bay leaf and water (or broth) and cook with lid for 30 minutes. Dissolve a packet of frozen ink in a little water, add and cook without lid for another 30 minutes. Eat with white rice. Sauce has to end up thick (and black).
Frozen cuttlefish: For lunch about twice a month. Thaw overnight, wash, cut into (big) bite-sized pieces and dry. Pan fry in hot oil for two minutes and set aside. Dump liquid, clean pan and fry again for another two minutes until golden (but no more than two or three minutes). Eat with broad beans sautéd with garlic.
Fresh fish: Deep-fried sardines for lunch once or twice a month and battered and deep-fried cod for lunch about once every month or two. I’ll sometimes use fresh instead of frozen whitefish, as indicated above. I’ve cut down on pan-fried fillets of big fish like tuna, swordfish, etc. due to price and mercury levels.
As with any foods, it’s never as blanket as that. You can still eat fish without devastating fishing stocks, depending on what you choose. There’s ample guidance available from places such as the Marine Conservation Society. Just saying you’ll eat more plant-based food, doesn’t mean you’ll chose the right plant based food which is grown with the environment in mind.
I eat fish probably five-six times a week. Working from home helps, as I can oven bake some fresh salmon (usually farmed) or pan fry some fresh haddock or cod for a very easy, quick lunch. I also live very close to an excellent fishmonger.
The only frozen fish I eat are prawns, lobster and octopus as they freeze well. I keep tinned sardines (for pasta) and tuna (for quick lunch options) in the cupboard. I often buy some smoked mackeral or trout.
But most fish I eat is fresh from the fishmonger.
I don’t buy fresh from the supermarkets, because it never is, and I’m not sure I trust their sustainability credentials. Their supply chains aren’t conducive to good, fresh fish either.
No, but I’d like to. The problem is that my sense of smell is messed up and I can’t tell when it’s gone bad. An afternoon bent over the commode has made me very hesitant to eat any fresh seafood now.
I can’t use up the typical frozen bags timely enough. I will have canned or packets of tuna maybe four times a year.
And I treat myself to lobster a couple times a year.
So, I"m trying to do better with vegetables instead.
Some fisheries are more sustainable than others, and if you’re going to eat fish, you’re doing the right thing by eating more sustainable varieties. But there just isn’t enough fish in the ocean to feed 8 billion people with a high fraction of fish in their diet. Same goes for red meat, mind you. And you’re certainly right that not all plant food is great, but on average it’s at least a couple orders of magnitude better than meat.
I’d guess you’re eating about 50 kg of fish per year. World fish production is about 200 billion kg per year. So you’re eating about twice the average, which is already too much. Probably more, really, since that world production figure includes a lot of entrails and cat food and other non-human-food.
Aquaculture helps, and is a significant portion of that world production figure, but isn’t a panacea and has its own sustainability problems.
All food does, at some level, and we’ve still gotta eat. And fish is exceptionally healthy.
8 billion people aren’t all about to start eating fish - heck, for many, they just don’t live close enough to the source, or don’t have the means of storage or transport.
I feel very comfortable with my fish consumption. I’m pretty ethical when it comes to my diet in general, careful to eat organic and locally sourced (in all food stuffs). I haven’t bought a battery farmed or even barn egg in decades. I shop mostly in local stores who buy their produce in 100 mile radius - including meat and most fish.
This blunt message of ‘don’t eat fish’ I just don’t agree with. It makes more sense to me to pay attention to where your food is coming from, and be prepared to spend more of your monthly budget on food to make better choices. All those people patting themselves on the back for eating plant-based when half their food has been force grown, at the cost of indigenous plants and forests, and shipped across continents shouldn’t be quick to feel smug.
No. Most wild-caught fish are unsustainably harvested, often with a huge amount of collateral damage to the environment. Fish farming is riddled with ecological problems.
You can carry a list of current ecologically “best choice” fish with you to the supermarket (the Sierra Club has one); often you’ll find nothing on your list matches what is for sale.
I eat fish occasionally. It is mostly frozen Atlantic cod, readily available around here. Sometimes farmed shrimp. Usually I put them in chowder.
It may be “good for you” but eating a lot of fish is bad for the rest of the planet. So I don’t.
I may be self-righteous but I’m not smug. I am as careful as I possibly can be about the ecological consequences of what I eat. I am perfectly aware that this is a futile gesture in the face of planetary climate collapse, how could I be smug? I still do it. I’ve made this effort ever since I was in a position to choose what I ate, which would be since the early 1970’s. And what a difference I’ve made, eh?
It’s smug to eat what you think is good for your own health without considering the other consequences of your choices, and then sneer at those who are less self-centered.
We like seafood, so we eat it often. Grilled, sushi, stews, whatever. But health isn’t a considers.
Of course I am… I love fish. It’s the rest of my family that’s taking some convincing. But my wife is mostly on board after years of patiently exposing her to well prepared and fresh fish. Apparently growing up, outside of fried catfish, she never really had what I’d consider good fish. To the point where she didn’t realize that fish isn’t supposed to smell fishy, and that’s a sign of aged or poorly kept fish.
But we’ve done Butcherbox a couple of times, and they have pretty good (and sustainable) sockeye salmon and pacific cod which comes flash frozen (a great way to get fish, FWIW). So we’ve been trying out different recipes to see what we like, don’t like, etc…