A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
This is part 2 of my posts on sushi mislabeling (see part 1 on sushi mislabeling). “Buyer beware” should be watchwords for anyone who eats fish in a restaurant. For various reasons — including fraud, ignorance, and sloppy supply chains — there’s a good chance that some of the fish served don’t match what the menu says. […]
You’ve just arrived at your favorite sushi restaurant, Edo, and the greeter takes you to your table and gives you the menu and a sheet with the nightly specials. The specials menu looks different. Instead of what you’re used to — a list of fish that are featured that night — there are also little red […]
“Trash fish” — a term used to describe less-marketable seafood that might normally be tossed back into the ocean — has been a hot topic in the last few years. To be better stewards of the oceans, we need to spark interest in less popular fish — the “trash fish” — thereby cutting waste, reducing pressures […]
(Updated 10/15/16: new photo, fixed or removed broken links; 1/7/17: new labeling law in New York) As a follow up to my piece about seafood mislabeling, let’s take a trip to the sushi bar, where things can be even more confusing. An already challenging language barrier is made more difficult by mangling of Japanese words […]
(Updated 2/20/17: fixed broken links) In a block of articles about sustainable seafood in Food and Wine magazine, Paul Greenberg (author of “Four Fish”*) has a bit of good news about red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), a species that has seen a steep population declines in the last 50 years. Thanks in part to a National […]
During an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Ellen Ruppel Shell, the author of “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” dropped an amazing fact: we eat more shrimp today in the U.S. than tuna fish. It was one of those “wow” statistics that I had to check out for myself. Fortunately, the […]
The humble fish stick — staple of school lunches and quick weeknight dinners — tells the story of American food since World War II. It tells us about technological innovation, the suburban explosion, America’s love with “the new,” and the major influence of government policy on what we eat. That I learned all of these […]
While doing some research for my “Eating by the Numbers” piece for Edible San Francisco, I ran into some fascinating documents about the now-gone California sardine industry. Today’s tourist destination of Cannery Row occupies land and buildings that were once a huge industry, employing thousands and providing a significant fraction of the U.S. seafood. But […]