Why does seafood go off so fast?

Factual Questions
1

Why does seafood go ‘off’ so much faster than any other type of food? Nothing goes off faster than a bucket of prawns in the sun.

2

It contains protein and (lots of) moisture, two of the four factors in the bacterial food poisoning quadrilateral - it’s like the fire triangle - heat, fuel, oxygen- only square - Food, moisture, warmth, time.

3

Also, it probably isn’t spoiling any faster than, say, a bucket of raw chicken pieces (which are also quite moist), it’s just that the products of decay are stinkier.

4

[SWAG]
When food ‘goes off’, it’s either a case of bacterial infection, of enzymal break-down.
Bacterial infection can be held off by ensuring that the foodstuff is clean / disinfected. (Maybe try to irradiate the prawns with a radioactive source?:wink: Or put them in a bucket of bleach?)
Enzymal break-down, however is harder to combat. It’s enzymes that are normally present in the animal to take care of its metabolism, that can start canibalize the animal itself. This is fairly easy to fight in warm-blooded animals, as these enzymes are optimized to work at body temperature. If you put your beef in the fridge it will slow down a lot.
On the other hand, fish (and most other sea-food) is cold-blooded, and their enzymes are optimized to work in the fairly cold sea. Therefore those enzymes will be able to work even at fridge temperatures.

[/SWAG]

5

Another WAG, but one possibly backed up by Mangetout’s post. Oxygen is ~21% of air, but dissolved oxygen is <1% of water. So there’s a lot more oxygen to speed up the process when you take them out of water.

6

Another big factor is time. When farm animals are processed, they are disassembled and chilled in less than an hour after death. The bacteria don’t get time to rot the meat. Fish, on the other hand, are yanked from the sea, and it may be hours or even days before they are processed.

The adage about government corruption says, “A fish rots from the head.” It may be true about governments, but fish rot from the gut outward. The sooner a fish is gutted, the less likely it will go bad before you eat it.