Tuesday, June 5, 2012

All the Fishies in the Sea

Breaded fish, pasta with pesto again, and a nice garden salad.  Oh, and completely homemade chocolate pudding made by Ian.

Fish is an issue -- trying to balance eating healthy seafood with saving money with protecting the planet.  Fish is one area where I feel eating responsibly is paramount, sometimes despite the dollar price.  So for example, I'd been pretty consistently buying the Trident brand Pacific flounder at Costco, it was relatively 'cheap' and I'd researched its sustainability.  But, they recently stopped stocking it.

I aim to eat fish once a week as my compromise baseline amount, and we sometimes do canned tuna or the Trident salmon burgers (a great choice BTW), but eating a whole fillet is really something nice to work into the rotation.  So we bought the mongo-expensive wild salmon for Mother's Day and enjoyed it, but I need something less pricey to rely on long-term.

Lead in to yesterday, again shopping and trying to compare prices and my little seafood-watch card.  I ended up buying Kirkland brand "Wild-caught Hake Loins", guessing it might be OK (I've never heard of hake).  But then at home, I had to go through this song and dance to find out if it was.  First, looking it up on the seafood watch online, it listed different kinds of hake with varying approval levels, but my package didn't specify what type it was.  Also, the list only included U.S. hake, and oddly enough, the fine print said mine was from Namibia.

Seriously?  Namibia?  I'm not even sure where that is, just that it's in Africa, and I'm not a complete geographical ignoramus.

So, here's the upshot: Namibian hake is a newer player on the fish scene, supplying Costco and apparently also Walmart with "sustainably sourced" African fish.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, truthfully -- importing fish from that far across the world for a major brand like Kirkland Signature doesn't seem reliably sustainable.  So for the moment, I guess we'll eat it while I keep looking.  Let me know if you've got any better ideas.

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