You've tried fish sticks, fish cakes, fish balls, fried fish, baked fish, grilled fish, and fish roe. Now get ready to add fish ice cream to the menu. News from India's Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) indicates a newly developed technology that can prepare nutrition enriched ice cream and noodles using seafood.Called Maricream (I know, terrible name), the ingredient list reads like a traditional ice cream recipe: water, sugar, butter, egg whites, flavoring substances, stabilizers and emulsifiers. Except the primary ingredient in the prototype product is cuttlefish. Okay, so it's mollusk ice cream. The mixture is whipped and pasteurized to form a rigid foamy substance and is finally frozen at -20 degree Celsius. The ice cream carries no fishy smell. According to CIFT, the resultant product is delicious and protein-packed. The fish noodles are also odor-free yet pack an increased nutritional value.
Regular readers of the blog Shifting Baselines will recall Jennifer Jacquet's recent call to eat like a pig. Her rationale: Stop depleting our oceans of tasty sardines, anchovies, and herring all to produce fishmeal to fatten pigs on factory farms and start filling our own bellies with this often under-appreciated seafood. Being low on the ocean food chain, sardines, anchovies, and herring are more plentiful and don't come with the risks of mercury and other bioaccumulating toxins found in tuna, swordfish, or other big-bodied marine species.
No hard sell for me. I happen to love sardines--my favorite brand being Matiz Gallego Portuguese sardines in olive oil at $2.99 a can. I'm also a big fan of anchovies on pizza, focaccia, in Pasta Puttanesca, or just straight out of the can. And as a good East Coast boy who hasn't met a Jewish deli I don't like, I love a good pickled herring. But I know I'm somewhat of an outlier. As Jennifer has documented, these species are too often unfairly perceived as trash fish here in the States.Which brings me back to fish ice cream and noodles. While I'm not a fan of a lot of processing when it comes to my food, maybe fish ice cream or fish noodles produced from sardines or herring can help serve as training wheels for fussy American palates and begin a process of weaning consumers from higher ocean trophic levels. It's a big maybe. But if we're going to have any success at salvaging ocean fisheries, it will require some risk taking on kooky ideas. Anyone for a herring hot-fudge sundae?
7 comments:
Anchovies have counted as a guilty pleasure of mine because I was under the impression that anchovy fisheries were pretty heavily hammered. Do I not need to feel so guilty about it? Because that would be great.
according to the environmental defense sustainable seafood guide, anchovies are considered a good choice...
only a fraction of the world's anchovy catch is destined for your dinner plate however — most are processed into fishmeal and fish oil for use in animal feeds, food additives, fertilizers and dietary supplements...
anchovies, which have short life spans and reproduce quickly, are resilient to fishing pressure and remain plentiful in many fishing grounds...
most edible anchovies sold in the U.S. are european anchovies...
i suspect australia may source it's anchovies from japan... japanese anchovies support one of the world’s largest fisheries, with landings of over 4 billion pounds in 2001...
the fishery is increasingly exploited, but populations so far appear resilient to heavy fishing pressure...
japanese anchovies are caught with purse seines, which have relatively low bycatch...
Meh, why not? They already put seaweed extracts in most ice cream already. Why not the rest of the ocean? :P
Fish Fish fish, I'd love it this way, people eating more fish than they'd ever imagine. ice cream fish is a good idea for us adults but do you think they would be bought by teeners?
Reminds me of the Iron Chef episode where one of the chefs made trout ice cream.
Sure, I love fish. ALOT. Eat it probably 5 days a week. But do we really want to live in a future where we grind up our elderly to make little pink food composites? This is what will happen when we've fished down the fish, the shellfish, the krill and finally all the plankton. This is the prophecy of Soylent Green... That and woman are furniture that come with your apartment.
kevin...
while i'm no fisheries expert, what i've come to understand is that if we can fish more down the food chain to rapidly reproducing species like anchovies, capelin, sardines, etc we stand a greater chance at sustainable fisheries...
but i'm also a realist and know people aren't gonna eschew their tuna and orange roughy or switch to the better alternative (become vegetarians) anytime soon... what i like about this process is it offers us a way to painlessly supplement protein into diets of people otherwise averse to the thought of eating sardines et al.
in truth, i don't personally care where that protein comes from: sardines, jellies, copepods, hagfish, termites, locusts, sewer rats, or even the elderly...
Post a Comment