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Seafood and Anxiety


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Yikes. A trio of op ed pieces on seafood that, together, seem to suggest that an entire category of food, its preparation, and the restaurants associated with it are about as worrisome as a Jack in the Box E. Coli burger.

First up: in "Catfish With a Side of Scombroid," Taras Grescoe tells us why our entire supply is seething with imported, disease-riddled seafood:

Every year about 6.6 million tons of seafood are imported into the United States from 160 different countries. That’s a lot of fish: the frozen shrimp alone would make a shrimp cocktail the size of the Sears Tower. Yet the Food and Drug Administration has only 85 inspectors working primarily with seafood.

If you want to spend a sobering half hour, go to the import alerts section of the administration’s Web site. There you will find claw crab meat from Indonesia rejected because of filth (meaning it may have carried rodent hairs or parts of disease-carrying insects), shrimp from Thailand rejected because of salmonella (in fact, 40 percent of rejections for salmonella were for shrimp) and tuna from Vietnam turned back for histamines (responsible for scombroid poisoning). Most troubling is the number of rejections because of banned veterinary drugs and antibiotics like chloramphenicol, a cause of aplastic anemia, and nitrofurans, which are suspected carcinogens.

Next, Trevor Corson tells us why shuddering Americans are all wrong when it comes to our relationship with sushi and its chefs:

Today, most Americans remain wary of the stern-faced sushi chef, and dare not sit at the bar — we wouldn’t know how to order or to control the bill. Many chefs, in turn, tell me that they’re fed up with the way we Americans mishandle our sushi, so they don’t bother to serve us the fun, flavorful and more peculiar toppings.

So Americans are stuck between chef-driven omakase meals at elite restaurants that cost a fortune and the cheap, predictable fare at our neighborhood places. Both extremes have deepened our dependence on tuna — at the high end, on super-fatty cuts of rare bluefin; and at the low end, on tasteless red flesh that has often been frozen for months and treated with chemicals to preserve its color.

Finally, our own Fat Guy, Steven Shaw, tells us that, when it comes to seafood paranoia, we might all be "Chicken of the Sea":

While Americans tend to associate raw fish with sushi and Japan, we have been eating raw seafood for centuries — namely, oysters and clams. And it is these raw mollusks, not the fish typically used in sushi, that are responsible for the overwhelming majority, about 85 percent, of seafood-related illnesses. As the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine concluded in a 1991 report on illness from eating seafood: “Most seafood-associated illness is reported from consumers of raw bivalve mollusks. ...The majority of incidents are due to consumption of shellfish from fecally polluted water.”

If you take raw and partly cooked shellfish out of the equation, the risk of falling ill from eating seafood is 1 in 2 million servings, the government calculated some years back; by comparison, the risk from eating chicken is 1 in 25,000.

To what extent are folks anxious about eating seafood -- raw, cooked, at home, at restaurants? Last weekend I consumed a massive platter of raw (and some cooked) shellfish at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal without a first thought about safety, so I may not be in the demographic. What do you think?

Chris Amirault

eG Ethics Signatory

Sir Luscious got gator belts and patty melts

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I think life would be sad if you worried, all the time, about every single thing you ate and whether or not it would make you sick. I've gotten food poisoning (e.coli) one time in my life, and it was from a crappy chain restaurant that I knew I shouldn't have been eating at in the first place. I've eaten raw oysters hundreds of times, along with sushi and ceviche, and never gotten ill. Go to reputable places with lots of business (lots of turnover) and you should be fine. Of course, I'm not a pregnant woman, frail or a child - obviously those people should probably avoid raw fish. But for the rest of us - let's all live a little!

"A culture's appetite always springs from its poor" - John Thorne

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In Japan, pregnant women (and children) do eat raw fish all the time. There are no negative public health impacts from it. Once you remove mollusks (raw oysters, etc.) from the equation, fish is safer than chicken. Nobody is telling pregnant women to avoid chicken, though it's entirely possible that such advice will eventually be dispensed. At some point, perhaps we will just put pregnant women on IV fluids and nutrient paste for nine months because, you know, anything else you eat is just too risky.

There are, however, public health impacts to not eating enough fish while pregnant. Between overblown mercury scares and the taboo (outside Japan) against pregnant women eating sushi, a lot of pregnant women in the West just aren't getting enough fish. I know plenty of women who just avoid fish altogether during their pregnancies, because that's the inevitable conclusion driven by the sum total of the bad advice they get.

On 27 February 2007, the New York Times reported on a study out of the UK:

The Food and Drug Administration advises pregnant women to avoid eating certain fish entirely, because they may contain unsafe levels of methylmercury, and to limit seafood to 12 ounces, or about two servings, a week. But a British report, published in The Lancet on Feb. 17, suggests that this may not be the best advice.

In an observational study of more than 8,000 pregnant women and their children, the researchers found that the children whose mothers ate less than 12 ounces of seafood a week were about 45 percent more likely to fall into the lowest 25 percent in I.Q.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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...To what extent are folks anxious about eating seafood -- raw, cooked, at home, at restaurants? Last weekend I consumed a massive platter of raw (and some cooked) shellfish at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal without a first thought about safety, so I may not be in the demographic. What do you think?

Hi Chris--

I hope you enjoyed your APdC meal, and will be checking out the Montreal forum to see if you left a report. :smile:

My .02 cents on this question tends to align with FG's. In general, North Americans are mistrustful (founded or not) of their food supply, and the title you used, with re: to ground beef bears this out. I am NOT saying there aren't some real dangers, but look at the following as three top-of-the-head examples*:

--I have spoken with some members of the Japan forum, and the majority of people there don't seem to think there is anything wrong with eating raw chicken--IF you know its shelf-life, age, provenance, etc.

--I dated a guy from Newfoundland, and after holiday turkey dinners, they would leave the entire bird carcass sitting on the counter (OMG you don't know how much I wanted to refrigerate it!) for a whole day before turning around the next morning and making turkey frame soup.

--There's a Greek guy in my neighbourhood who owns a breakfast joint, and buddy keeps entire boxes of eggs, unrefrigerated, in his car--even on days when the mercury might reach 30 celsius.

SO, I know I'm talking about storage and preparation when you started this off as being about origin, but worrying about your food doesn't make it any safer. Europeans store butter and unpasteurized cheeses at room temperature, and we don't hear of them expiring in droves.

My fear about the neurotic North American way of looking at food--and I don't even know if this is scientifically possible--is that, in the same way we're made bacteria stronger by using too much and too strong and too frequent anti-bacterial products, is that we'll make our digestive systems less resistant to routine, sub-disease-level causing amounts of naturally-occurring 'contaminants'.

* = I think I may have opened myself to criticism with this post, but please know, if any of you were to come eat at my house, I do NOT practice any of those food 'storage' methods I outlined above. :laugh:

Edited by gus_tatory (log)

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the ocean."

--Isak Dinesen

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To what extent are folks anxious about eating seafood -- raw, cooked, at home, at restaurants? Last weekend I consumed a massive platter of raw (and some cooked) shellfish at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal without a first thought about safety, so I may not be in the demographic. What do you think?

Lately, I've become hyper-aware of where my seafood has come from, to the point of not ordering it at a restaurant (with the exception of a few sushi places that I trust implicitly) unless the restaurant is sure of it's origins. I'm particularly concerned with imported fish and farmed fish as well as the giant fish that may have mercury issues, since we're thinking of trying to have a rugrat in the near future (I rarely eat any sort of tuna anymore). I do still eat raw seafood, but I don't think you could pay me to eat at the types of "all you can eat" sushi places that I used to favor in college!

I'm trying to buy only fish that's somewhat local, or at the very least has not been shipped from halfway across the world. I also tend to buy whole fish, because I feel like I can check the freshness better (if it's a big fish, I will vacuum seal and freeze the extra, and then you have excellent bones and heads for stock too). Given that I'm in Chicago, there are not a lot of options for locally caught fish, so for variety's sake, I have to buy shipped product more than I'm happy with (or order it in a restaurant). I think I do eat fish and seafood less than I used to. However, I tend to gorge myself on seafood when I'm traveling in places along the ocean, especially those types of places along the shore where you pick your fish (or whatever) and then they prepare it for you.

Also keep in mind that seafood can be problematic not just because of disease but the whole issue of the carbon footprint with "fresh" fish air freighted in from distant points. I do think that fish farming has lots of possibilities for the future in terms of protecting wild fish stocks, but so far there have been enough problems that I am wary (especially with farmed fish from places like China).

Of course, the best fish is one you catch yourself! Just the thought of some panfish cooking over a campfire is making me want to drag out the tent and head up to Wisconsin! Of course who's to say that one lake is any cleaner than another--no good way to tell. So I guess extreme anxiety about fish if I don't know it's origins, but little anxiety if I trust the restaurant, fishmonger, particular body of water or geographical region, etc.

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First up: in "Catfish With a Side of Scombroid," Taras Grescoe tells us why our entire supply is seething with imported, disease-riddled seafood:

Every year about 6.6 million tons of seafood are imported into the United States from 160 different countries. That’s a lot of fish: the frozen shrimp alone would make a shrimp cocktail the size of the Sears Tower. Yet the Food and Drug Administration has only 85 inspectors working primarily with seafood.

If you want to spend a sobering half hour, go to the import alerts section of the administration’s Web site. There you will find claw crab meat from Indonesia rejected because of filth (meaning it may have carried rodent hairs or parts of disease-carrying insects), shrimp from Thailand rejected because of salmonella (in fact, 40 percent of rejections for salmonella were for shrimp) and tuna from Vietnam turned back for histamines (responsible for scombroid poisoning). Most troubling is the number of rejections because of banned veterinary drugs and antibiotics like chloramphenicol, a cause of aplastic anemia, and nitrofurans, which are suspected carcinogens.

I haven't changed my seafood habits for 35 years, other than reading the signs indicating origin that have proliferated in recent years, so no real issues here.

Isn't that Times headline a bit inappropriate, given that the article is concerned mostly with problems in imported fish & suggests that we consume more domestic product? I think of catfish as a specifically American fish, although I know that much of the farmed stuff is now imported, as the article mentions toward the end. Still seems out of line with the thrust of the piece.

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea!

- Sydney Smith, English clergyman & essayist, 1771-1845

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I know plenty of women who just avoid fish altogether during their pregnancies, because that's the inevitable conclusion driven by the sum total of the bad advice they get.

I ate so much wild caught salmon from Norway during my pregnancies that I am almost OFF salmon for good.

Not really but its a WHOLE lot more than when I am not pregnant. The DHA and other goodies in fish make it worth the drudgery of eating so much fish (ok, I know I am very lucky to have been able to swing the fish for 9 months X 3, I am glad to have done it).

I also think all women should supplement with triple molecularly distilled DHA, with a boost above their usual baseline during pregnancy.

Nika

Edited by NikaBoyce (log)
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I've never worried about ground beef but I don't typically eat the stuff that comes pre-ground from giant meat packing plants and I never ever eat fast food burgers because I don't enjoy them.

As for seafood.... did once have a really bad a bad experience with either raw clams or raw oysters (we were never sure which as about 10 of us in a group of 15 were all affected and we all ate both). It was so painful and profound that I didn't touch raw clams again for about three years and it was many years after that before I once again tried raw oysters (which I rarely ate until just a few years back because I had never tried any that I liked until I had some in the Pacific Northwest).

Up here in the semi-boondocks where I live the bigger concern is limiting the amount of large locally caught fresh-water fish that one eats due to mercury level concerns. I eat local freshwater fish a couple times each year and never give it a thought.

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But, just as we get on our 'fish is safe' high horse, I just want to remind people of a couple of previous eGullet topics that haunt me to this day:

#1

#2 (scroll down to post #8)

Both links point right to the post with a picture, but the whole threads are interesting.

And one of my employees just returned from France. While there he had some mussels that allegedly caused a bacterial infection in his system. The French doctors missed it so it settled behind his eye and now he is permanently blind in that eye.

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Absolutely everything in life including staying home and doing absolutely nothing has risk. I do my best to limit risk, but also compare it to the potential benefit. I consider pleasure a benefit. As such I eat raw seafood and plenty of other "dangerous" things. I try to limit the risk, by having some idea of the provenance of what I eat. I try to limit eating southeast Asian farmed shrimp, not so much because of any specific health risk associated with it, but because I think it is rarely a good product - at least not compared to reasonably fresh wild or other farm-raised shrimp. Not all farms are created equal. I also like most of the more unusual items at sushi counters.

John Sconzo, M.D. aka "docsconz"

"Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster."

- Ferran Adria on eGullet 12/16/2004.

Docsconz - Musings on Food and Life

Slow Food Saratoga Region - Co-Founder

Twitter - @docsconz

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But, just as we get on our 'fish is safe' high horse, I just want to remind people of a couple of previous eGullet topics that haunt me to this day:

#1

#2

Both links point right to the post with a picture, but the whole threads are interesting.

And one of my employees just returned from France.  While there he had some mussels that allegedly caused a bacterial infection in his system.  The French doctors missed it so  it settled behind his eye and now he is permanently blind in that eye.

So sorry to hear about your guy, that sounds brutal.

I love sushi but I have only ever eaten it here in the US. The only time I have ever gotten food poisoning was on a trip to Colombia South America at a family pig roast/stew. The soup made from the fresh pig was made from water drawn from a cistern (open at the top and it had a dead bird floating in it, come to find out later). I barfed for days on end. I didnt emerge from my bed until a week later. It hasnt kept me from pig roasts, just Colombian campesino cisterns with dead birds floating in them.

I remember the USC (U SoCal) dining room had a display right outside the door that showed all the lovely delicate little parasites one can and do encounter whilst eating raw fish. I remember looking at it with my fellow lab-mates and turning to them and saying "yumm, so who is up for sushi tonight?" We hit the bar and enjoyed loads of sushi.

Life is short. Parasites suck. Living in fear is a choice. As long as I am not pregnant, I am ready to try lots of things, as long as I know there are no hidden dead birds. If the prep and supply chain is to extensive, I pass on it, no matter what country.

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For the record, the worm crawling out of the salmon that led to a previous topic only deterred me for a short time - I'm definitely not a fearful eater. But, I certainly do hold my fish up to lights and pick through it a bit - my rule is, if you don't see it it won't kill you (although clearly it can blind you).

BTW, welcome to the Society Nika.

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But, just as we get on our 'fish is safe' high horse, I just want to remind people of a couple of previous eGullet topics that haunt me to this day:

#1

#2

Both links point right to the post with a picture, but the whole threads are interesting.

And one of my employees just returned from France.  While there he had some mussels that allegedly caused a bacterial infection in his system.  The French doctors missed it so  it settled behind his eye and now he is permanently blind in that eye.

Could you repost the link to #2 - the link seems broken!

I am a converted non-veggie - and was gungho on fish coz I didn't like initially and now I can't go a week without sushi...

I know I have seen bugs and grubs crawling out of veggies also - and have been bitten by them too - so I am not going to be off - but I would definitely like to take precautions - especially while cooking at home

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hmmm, funny thing is i found this site a few weeks ago (and subsequently joined) because of that "Chicken of the Sea" Op-Ed that "fat guy" (Steven Shaw, as I was first introduced to him) wrote for the NY Times, talking about seafood and such (he mentioned the pregancy thing earlier in this thread). :smile:

anyway, after i read eric schlosser's fast food nation and some other stuff for a class i took my last semester of college called "culture and consumption", i've been a lot more aware of this food safety stuff. plus, culture (and food+culture) really interests me.

i think fat guy was right on when he talked about raw fish in that piece. i disagree that people are really as aware of food safety in the US as we might think; sure, there's the whole e.coli thing, but something i have become more and more infuriated with is the fact that, unless you read a work like FFN, you're not going to be aware that the meat industry that produces most of that beef on the national level doesn't actually recall a large percent of what could be contaminated, because they just aren't required. it's a voluntary recall system, thanks to certain decisions by those in power (and probably under influence), and people are getting ill from the fact that they feel (and rightly so) that those who produce their food should be protecting them.

for me, seafood isn't really an issue. i won't get shellfish or raw seafood from a place that seems really sketchy (especially if it's too cheap), and one of the things i find easiest to digest is a plate of plain sashimi with a bowl of rice. the thing is, i realize that most food is unsafe in some way, and there is a lot of sensationalism in the media of some things, while a complete ignorance of others (a simple example of this would be the difference i see in coverage of bovine spongiform disease instances and cases in europe and the US). unless i produce all my food from scratch (which would be interesting, but time consuming after a certain point), i realize that every bite i take is a risk. that's basically what it's come to for me.

i think a major problem, though, is that food safety is handled as a matter of personal responsibility, and not a social issue as it should be. why are these foods unsafe? well, it's because of the way the industries surrounding them have developed (a point that seems to be COMPLETELY lost by the mass-media when discussing schlosser's work - it's not about the fast food, people, it's about what all food has become as a result!). ground beef produced at the level for which most fast food chains buy is produced in such bad conditions, at such a rushed pace, and there could be three months of contaminated beef (or worse) inside one burger. however, what we hear is that "you should cook all ground beef to 160 degrees, or until no liquid seeps when you press the burger". who wants to live like that?? dry burgers?? eegghhh.. it's not my fault poor illegal immigrants are paid badly and treated worse to slice apart cattle at breakneck speed in terrible conditions. it's almost enough for me to be come vegetarian (again, though not because of that).

sorry, i ranted, and i sort of went off topic. i do that. once i start posting more regularly (this is my first!) you'll all come to realize that. i almost love ranting as much as i love food!

ps. i know it's very conspiracy-theory-esque, although i think that there's certainly very sketchy stuff coming out of china food-wise, i've been tempted to feel that the massive coverage we've been faced with is a way in order to hold off china's economic growth... i do admit that's just my theory (which i hope is wrong). it's also based on the fact that there's still a possibilty for spinal matter in your good ol' american hot dogs, but no one says a word about that... :hmmm: damn you, media! ::shakes fist::

"I know it's the bugs, that's what cheese is. Gone off milk with bugs and mould - that's why it tastes so good. Cows and bugs together have a good deal going down."

- Gareth Blackstock (Lenny Henry), Chef!

eG Ethics Signatory

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For the record, the worm crawling out of the salmon that led to a previous topic only deterred me for a short time - I'm definitely not a fearful eater.  But, I certainly do hold my fish up to lights and pick through it a bit - my rule is, if you don't see it it won't kill you (although clearly it can blind you).

BTW, welcome to the Society Nika.

gfron1: Thanks for the welcome!

Does this mean you look through your sushi at sushi bars? I think the sushi chef would lose his mind!

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