My strategy for survival in the event of the Rapture:
[ol]
[li]Dig hold in the back yard.[/li][li]Fill hole with water.[/li][li]Buy a school of teeny tiny goldfish for a couple of bucks.[/li][li]Toss goldfish in hole.[/li][li]Ignore goldfish until they get enormous.[/li][li]Eat goldfish.[/li][/ol]
I forsee only one potential problem: how do they taste? I know they’re related to carp, but is the meat similar? I mean, they essentially eat feces, but so do their cousins, and I luvs me some carp.
Looking around the net, I can see that they can get up to a foot with no real problem, so you’d think somebody would have had the nerve to eat them by now. I can’t seem to find anything about it, though. Just how many pounds do they get up to, anyway?
Does anybody have any recipes?
Thanks.
I’m pretty sure they taste like cheddar cheese.
Daniel
In this case it would be wet cheddar cheese.
They actually come in several flavors now. The small ones are really hard to filet.
My college dormmates would drop them in a glass of beer and swallow them whole. I guess that sort of like beer-battered fish, isn’t it?
Hell, come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t even need to dig a hole. Just let a garbage can fill up with rainwater, dump the suckers in there, and voila: aquaculture.
Um, If all you do is dig a hole, it won’t hold water. I’d suggest a liner.
Oh, and the goldfish is genus Carassius. This type of carp does not have barbels and gets about 20 cm long. Genus Cyprinus, the koi, has barbels and gets to 100 cm. I think the koi is the kind of carp that most folks in the US eat and would probably be closer to the taste you are after. But that’s a guess.
They won’t grow as big in a garbage can as in a larger pond.
Sorry, wouldn’t work.
I’ve killed many a goldfish in my time because they are actually very care-intensive. They foul their water very quickly, and therefore you either need an aquarium with an aerator or you have to change the water daily. I’ve had much better luck with bettas, but they’re kind of small to be worth raising for food.
Most of the koi I’ve seen are either in aquariums or in fountain pools- I suspect that the water from the fountain falling back into the water aerates it.
If you want to get into aquaculture with teeny-tiny portions, I might suggest live-bearers such as platys (Xiphophorus maculatus). Most people find them fairly easy to care for and extraodinarily easy to breed. A female from the fish-store usually arrives pregnant and from then on it’s just a matter of trying to keep up (although since you’re raising them to eat, it may be easier for you than most…).
it is a common myth that goldfish are a hardy and easy fish to raised. most people are happy when a goldfish lives a year or two, yet the life span of a healthy goldfish is 15 years!
also, a goldfish’s max size depends on it’s environment. a goldfish in a bowl will stop growing before a goldfish in a small pond, who will stop before a goldfish in large pond. in order to reap any benifits, you will have to wait about 4 years (goldfish don’t grow very fast) and have a pretty big hole. you might be better off going down to your local trout stream. in cases of extreme starvation you can always build a fish trap or use a fish poison like lime, green butternut or black walnut husks, or if your in polynesia, crushed barringtonia seeds and bark.
http://www.wilderness-survival.net/food-4.php
You can eat them, if you don’t mind the taste of wet cardboard.