From now on Fish Once a Month, not on Fridays......
It’s not easy being healthy is it? At least as far as eating right is concerned. First we are told not to eat red meat, it clogs your veins and gives you heart attacks. Then you shouldn’t do dairy, it clogs your veins and makes you “mucous”. Don’t overdo carbs, sugar kills and fat is bad. Now we learn that fish is toxic and you shouldn’t eat it more than once a month.
Last week the US Environmental protection Agency (EPA) announced that the fish in almost all US lakes and rivers are contaminated with mercury, a highly toxic metal that poses health risks, particularly to pregnant women, children under six and increased risks of high blood pressure and heart disease in adults. Excessive mercury can kill you, quickly or slowly, depending on the amount. One in twelve Americans have dangerously high levels says the EPA. The symptoms of high mercury are not nice and include, fatigue, hair loss, headache, decreased concentration and memory, nausea and joint pain.
In the past year the EPA and the FDA have warned of dangerous levels of mercury in canned tuna, sword fish, shark, mackerel, sea bass, halibut, red snapper, grouper, orange roughy, lake trout, bluefish, bonito, rockfish and fresh tuna such as ahi and albacore. The list goes on to include: Mahi mahi, cod, pollock, lake whitefish, blue mussels, oysters, tilefish, marlin and pike.
So what’s left?
The Environmental Working Group in Washington DC tells us you can safely eat salmon, mid-Atlantic blue crab, croaker (what’s that?), fish sticks, flounder, haddock, trout and shrimp.
Ah But! Arf a mo, it’s not as easy as that.....
You can’t eat farmed fish because the FDA, EPA tell us that not only do farmed fish lack much of the nutritional value of wild fish but they are dangerously polluted with chemical carcinogens like PCBs and contain hormones and anti-biotics, all of which are bad for you. In other words unless the salmon you buy specifically says that it is “wild” or that it is “organically” bred and you believe them, you can’t eat salmon or any other farmed fish either.
If like me you were brought up at boarding schools in England you would most likely have an abiding hatred for eating fish anyway. It seems the posher the school the fouler the food. The foulest of the foul, I seem to remember, was haddock which was served up reeking in a disgusting yellow watery liquid described no doubt in the parents prospectus on nutrition as “butter sauce”. Whenever fish was served it was served boiled and was disgusting. Hidden in this this horrid muck were hundreds bones so sharp they could pierce your throat and like as not kill you.
So spooked was I that at home, when fish was served, I would refuse to touch any of it, no matter how delicious. With saintly patience my mother would tempt me with other kinds of seafood like scallops, prawn and smoked fish, all of which I loved. She even got me going on what I called “meaty” fish like poached salmon. As a teenager in London fending for my self I ate cans and cans of tuna, which hardly seemed like fish at all.
It really wasn’t until I came to Asia and specifically Thailand, that I really began to enjoy eating fish. From then on I entered a totally new relationship to eating fish in any cuisine, though I still didn’t like bones and avoid the smaller non-meaty or what I call “fishy-fish”. I can’t help it, the idea of eating eyes and “insides” of fish, however small, is I find offputting no matter how delicious people say they are. Indeed, as I progressively lost my taste for eating meat, until I stopped eating it at all, I came to rely on my fish fix at least 3 times a week. Nowadays I just love eating fish.
And now that I do, it seems that it is bad for me and I must stop it. Or at least do it a lot less. It appears that while fish are very good for you because of all the essential fatty acids they contain, they are now bad for you because of all the toxins in them.
So what’s a poor body to do if it wants to eat healthy?
Folks who are really into their food can con themselves into almost anything so long as it’s tasty. Most so-called foodies wouldn’t know fresh ingredients if they got up and bit them. They just like it rich and tasty, dished up at trendy watering-holes or ever-so smart dinner parties. The hoi polloi are into convenience food laced with salt and sugar and are handsomely pandered to and poisoned by the multinational ogres of mass nutrition. Most of us who try to eat well and healthy, but still want a modicum of convenience, have to pay a premium for organic and free range produce but most of all we have to ignore inconvenient facts. I mean, the fact that fish were contaminated in this way has been know for years. I for one just chose to ignore it and now I’m probably as full of mercury as a thermometer. To eat really, really healthy food and to eat it in season in the place it was naturally grown is no easy thing. In fact food like this is as often as not served up so plain as to be inedible. It’s what I call “hippy food”.
You can run but you can’t hide.
Us folks in Bali may think we’re doing pretty good with fresh food, but don’t let’s kid ourselves too much. The fish come from the same oceans, pesticides and fertilisers are used on the land world over and flow into these same oceans. No, I think it’s time for us all to bite the bullet and face the fact that we need to stop polluting the planet and poisoning ourselves. And that is not going to happen before dinner. Not if George Bush et al have anything to do with it. That stalwart of Compassionate Conservatism and well known friend of the environment has just proposed to reduce mercury emissions by industry into the environment by 29% by 2010 and 70% by 2018, that is if you can trust him to follow through. Not good enough, say the Democrats, we can and must reduce emissions 90% by 2008.
So, meantime until that good day dawns, when the earth is clean and pure once more. we’ll just have eat as best we can, do a little poison and do a little detox. It’s the human condition.....
