Crap Shoot
Two years later, I'm still all churned up about the Ex-Lax Fish
I've just been composing another dissertaion, this time in response to an unfortunate reporter in Hawaii who ate some escolar fish, got sick from it, looked it up on the internet, found some Riverfront Times blurb I'd written on the subject like 2 years ago, and emailed me forthwith to find out whether the vigilant St. Louis public health authorities had quickly acted to prevent future restaurant-goers from involuntarily going mano a mano with such strange and savage forces of nature as only the murky deep could contrive to infuse in a single entree.
This is going to be a fish story, so if you need stimulants, now's the time.
The plot so far:
Escolar, in case you wisely avoid eating trendy seafood, is the common name for a couple of species of snake mackerel (Gempylidae) which are netted inadvertently in tuna catches. Enterprising wholesalers hawk these gloomy-looking fish to restaurateurs as an eonomical substitute for the politically incorrect, endangered, expensive, and really delicious Chilean sea bass. They get away with this because escolar tastes pretty good, like warm butter, if butter were like a delicious fish. The trouble is that escolar owes all this buttery deliciousness to an indigestible waxy ester (gempylotoxin) that acts on human innards much like that fake fat Olestra--you remember Olestra, and its quaint "anal leakage"?--only with extra-super-painful-explosive results. I know this because two years ago, when I was still young and full of hopes and dreams, I personally ate some escolar. The episode robbed me of my legendary vim for several days. Several days!
As for my youth, my hopes, my dreams--well, I never saw them again.
That dining out can, without warning, turn from a pleasant diversion to a matter wherein lives hang in the balance mirrors the economy of the seafood industry. The world of fish-mongering is a torrid one. Sometimes seafood wholesalers, wrestling with thorny principles of supply and demand, feel unburdened by scruple. The chilling fact is, they just make stuff up in order to sell fish. Maybe they got some cheap shark, so they pass it off as expensive swordfish, or they chop it up into little cubes and call it scallops. Because who's gonna know? Are you an ichthyologist? No, you are not. Once you chop off its head and slice it up, a skink's as good as a cod to a blind man.
Or they invent romantic and misleading pseudonyms, euphemistically called "market names," to divert the consumer's attention from brutal truths. Take scrod. It isn't a species, but any old Atlantic fish weighing under 2 pounds. "Pacific red snapper" is a totally bogus alias for rockfish, a homely, antisocial, and endangered creature that has nothing to do with real red snapper from the Gulf of Mex (as a further complication, rockfish means striped bass if you're in Maryland).
So pervasive is this practice of piscine obfuscation that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, in an effort to quash the resulting torrent of fraud, publishes a compendium entitled The Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia . This gripping thriller lists all available fishes, their vernacular names, their Latin nomenclature, their habitats, photographs of the fish (both whole and fillets), and reproductions of gels showing their unique protein patterns.
Which brings me to the so-called "Hawaiian escolar." Undeniably more poetical an epithet than "snake mackerel," it is technically bogus all the same. But dumb restaurant owners don't know this, because at night they're not curling up next to the fire with a hot toddy and The Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia. Their glib and oily fish salesmen wave a few 2-dollar fillets at them, tease them with comparisons to sea bass, tempt them with the word "Hawaiian" which they confuse with a promise of 72 virgins, and in their mind's eye they can already see it on the menu, pan-roasted with pistachio butter for $22.95, cha-ching.
Thus did the RFT publish, following my scathing indictment of the wanton proliferation of lethal escolar dishes in mediocre restaurants two years ago, a communique from some dumb restaurant owners. R.L. Steamer's, which I think closed this year, was a mediocre restaurant apparently enjoying a brisk escolar trade at the time. Mr. and Mrs. Steamer (!) sternly called my escolar expertise into question. Any idiot, they said, quoting their glib and oily fish salesman, knows the difference between Gulf escolar and Hawaiian escolar! Never mind that they dumbly named their dumb restaurant in the apostrophe-crazed-franchise tradition of TGI Friday's; the poor chumps had been brainwashed. They truly believed in the gastrointestinal harmlessness of Hawaiian escolar. The Gulf variety makes you sick, they insisted, but the Hawaiian kind--the only kind they serve--is absolutely devoid of "the elements that cause gastric distress."
My pen pal from the Maui News, a man who ate a poison fish fillet in Paradise and barely lived to tell the tale, would beg to differ.
What the Steamers chose not to know is that fish dealers are the only people on earth who make geographical distinctions amongst escolar. The FDA doesn't. The Center For Food Safety & Applied Nutrition doesn't. Ichthyologists don't. In fact, there is no such thing as Gulf escolar. There is no such thing as Hawaiian escolar. The world over, all escolarian taxonomy is identical. They are gempylids. If you eat them, they make you poop. A lot. They're not all that good to look at, either.
I burden you with this information so that you might
a) think twice before buying Chilean sea bass, which not only has been fished nearly to extinction, but stands a large likelihood of having been switched for escolar on the down-low, and
b) avoid like the plague anything that someone has actually had the balls to admit is escolar, Hawaiian or otherwise (because the FDA, though it limply warns against importing the purgative fish, removed it from the Banned Fish List in 1992. I have been unable to ascertain why. Probably for the same reason it gave the green light to Olestra; some jolly government prankster though it was funny, the idea of overweight Americans running around in stained underwear with fistfuls of fat-free Cheez-Waffies. I am generally against banning things against the possibility that a few morons may injure themselves--caveat emptor and all that--but people get really ill from this fish, and anecdotal evidence has it that one woman actually died of it. Of course I blame the patriarchy), and
c) remember to question fish authority.
I've just been composing another dissertaion, this time in response to an unfortunate reporter in Hawaii who ate some escolar fish, got sick from it, looked it up on the internet, found some Riverfront Times blurb I'd written on the subject like 2 years ago, and emailed me forthwith to find out whether the vigilant St. Louis public health authorities had quickly acted to prevent future restaurant-goers from involuntarily going mano a mano with such strange and savage forces of nature as only the murky deep could contrive to infuse in a single entree.
This is going to be a fish story, so if you need stimulants, now's the time.
The plot so far:
Escolar, in case you wisely avoid eating trendy seafood, is the common name for a couple of species of snake mackerel (Gempylidae) which are netted inadvertently in tuna catches. Enterprising wholesalers hawk these gloomy-looking fish to restaurateurs as an eonomical substitute for the politically incorrect, endangered, expensive, and really delicious Chilean sea bass. They get away with this because escolar tastes pretty good, like warm butter, if butter were like a delicious fish. The trouble is that escolar owes all this buttery deliciousness to an indigestible waxy ester (gempylotoxin) that acts on human innards much like that fake fat Olestra--you remember Olestra, and its quaint "anal leakage"?--only with extra-super-painful-explosive results. I know this because two years ago, when I was still young and full of hopes and dreams, I personally ate some escolar. The episode robbed me of my legendary vim for several days. Several days!
As for my youth, my hopes, my dreams--well, I never saw them again.
That dining out can, without warning, turn from a pleasant diversion to a matter wherein lives hang in the balance mirrors the economy of the seafood industry. The world of fish-mongering is a torrid one. Sometimes seafood wholesalers, wrestling with thorny principles of supply and demand, feel unburdened by scruple. The chilling fact is, they just make stuff up in order to sell fish. Maybe they got some cheap shark, so they pass it off as expensive swordfish, or they chop it up into little cubes and call it scallops. Because who's gonna know? Are you an ichthyologist? No, you are not. Once you chop off its head and slice it up, a skink's as good as a cod to a blind man.
Or they invent romantic and misleading pseudonyms, euphemistically called "market names," to divert the consumer's attention from brutal truths. Take scrod. It isn't a species, but any old Atlantic fish weighing under 2 pounds. "Pacific red snapper" is a totally bogus alias for rockfish, a homely, antisocial, and endangered creature that has nothing to do with real red snapper from the Gulf of Mex (as a further complication, rockfish means striped bass if you're in Maryland).
So pervasive is this practice of piscine obfuscation that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, in an effort to quash the resulting torrent of fraud, publishes a compendium entitled The Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia . This gripping thriller lists all available fishes, their vernacular names, their Latin nomenclature, their habitats, photographs of the fish (both whole and fillets), and reproductions of gels showing their unique protein patterns.
Which brings me to the so-called "Hawaiian escolar." Undeniably more poetical an epithet than "snake mackerel," it is technically bogus all the same. But dumb restaurant owners don't know this, because at night they're not curling up next to the fire with a hot toddy and The Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia. Their glib and oily fish salesmen wave a few 2-dollar fillets at them, tease them with comparisons to sea bass, tempt them with the word "Hawaiian" which they confuse with a promise of 72 virgins, and in their mind's eye they can already see it on the menu, pan-roasted with pistachio butter for $22.95, cha-ching.
Thus did the RFT publish, following my scathing indictment of the wanton proliferation of lethal escolar dishes in mediocre restaurants two years ago, a communique from some dumb restaurant owners. R.L. Steamer's, which I think closed this year, was a mediocre restaurant apparently enjoying a brisk escolar trade at the time. Mr. and Mrs. Steamer (!) sternly called my escolar expertise into question. Any idiot, they said, quoting their glib and oily fish salesman, knows the difference between Gulf escolar and Hawaiian escolar! Never mind that they dumbly named their dumb restaurant in the apostrophe-crazed-franchise tradition of TGI Friday's; the poor chumps had been brainwashed. They truly believed in the gastrointestinal harmlessness of Hawaiian escolar. The Gulf variety makes you sick, they insisted, but the Hawaiian kind--the only kind they serve--is absolutely devoid of "the elements that cause gastric distress."
My pen pal from the Maui News, a man who ate a poison fish fillet in Paradise and barely lived to tell the tale, would beg to differ.
What the Steamers chose not to know is that fish dealers are the only people on earth who make geographical distinctions amongst escolar. The FDA doesn't. The Center For Food Safety & Applied Nutrition doesn't. Ichthyologists don't. In fact, there is no such thing as Gulf escolar. There is no such thing as Hawaiian escolar. The world over, all escolarian taxonomy is identical. They are gempylids. If you eat them, they make you poop. A lot. They're not all that good to look at, either.
I burden you with this information so that you might
a) think twice before buying Chilean sea bass, which not only has been fished nearly to extinction, but stands a large likelihood of having been switched for escolar on the down-low, and
b) avoid like the plague anything that someone has actually had the balls to admit is escolar, Hawaiian or otherwise (because the FDA, though it limply warns against importing the purgative fish, removed it from the Banned Fish List in 1992. I have been unable to ascertain why. Probably for the same reason it gave the green light to Olestra; some jolly government prankster though it was funny, the idea of overweight Americans running around in stained underwear with fistfuls of fat-free Cheez-Waffies. I am generally against banning things against the possibility that a few morons may injure themselves--caveat emptor and all that--but people get really ill from this fish, and anecdotal evidence has it that one woman actually died of it. Of course I blame the patriarchy), and
c) remember to question fish authority.
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