Japan: Another favorite dish going extinct

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/IF13Dh01.html


A revered tradition during Japan's hot and humid summer is eating broiled eel, a dish believed to induce energy. But this year, the item has been elusive on menus following a decision by the European Union to slash eel exports.

Facing stock depletion, Europe is considering a move to have the trade in eels restricted under the Washington Convention that protects endangered species in the world.

European exports, mostly juvenile eel caught off the coasts of France and Spain and then dispatched to countries such as China for cultivation, account for between 50% to 70% of Japanese consumption, now around 100,000 tons per year.

-snip-

"The threat to eels this summer symbolizes a crisis we had chosen to ignore but cannot any longer. It shows, very cruelly, that the Japanese are steadily losing their food supply and also that money cannot buy everything,'' she told Inter Press Service (IPS).
-snip-
-----------------------------------


links in our food chain are falling off at a faster and faster rate

neo cons rule

there will be violence

[Tyler Durden]

1. Eat the rich.

Good protein source, plenty of fat to make soap from.

[Javaman]

2. The Rich are Soylent Green!! oh wait, that's okay. :) tastes like chicken.

:rofl:

[Tyler Durden]

7. Actually, since they are MOSTLY fat....

Tyler Durden sez: USE SOAP!

[Javaman]

11. The soap is Soylent Green!!! No wonder I blow bubbles after I eat.

:freak:

[Bake]

3. Are there no eels in Japanese waters?

I'm surprised they import them from Europe.

Bake

[donsu]

5. take a guess

nt

[Bake]

6. They ate 'em all already? n/t

Bake

[demnan]

4. Never in my life would I have thought we'd be short on eels

We used to curse the little devils for messing up our fishing lines, then cut them up and put them in our crab traps for bait. The lower Potomac was brimming with them. Come to think of it, I haven't seen an eel down there in ages.

[donsu]

8. yep, when I was a kid fishing in Chesapeake Bay we caught eels

long ago and far away

[ozone_man]

9. They're not bad tasting at all.

A slight rubbery quality compared to white fish, but nothing like squid. So, you catch a 3' eel at night instead of a striper, make a circumferential slit behind the gills and, with the pliers, pull that skin right off. Like shucking corn. The trick is not to tell the family what they're eating for dinner. Just one of those long fish, forgot the name.

[Lisa]

10. "unagi" in Japan -- a real delicacy

They're BBQed and served in a delicious savory sauce. I used to love them when I was a kid. The canned variety from Japan would cost a fortune, so we only had them at Christmas. The ones from China are a lot cheaper, but I stopped eating them some time ago because I was worried about possible contamination (even before the latest media stories).

[TahitiNut]

13. I love many kinds of nigiri sushi ...

... but others are more than welcome to my 'share' of unagi and uni. (Yech.)

[Lisa]

14. I've got a funny uni story for you, TahitiNut

A long time ago, my dad was an official with the Canadian judo team when they travelled to Puerto Rico for the PanAmerican Games. He and one of his buddies (whom I think ended up teaching judo to our Prime Minister Trudeau and his kids) were out walking on the beach, when they spied a bunch of sea urchins in a tidal pool. So Dad and his friend, never being shy about this kind of thing, started cracking the urchins open. This attracted quite the crowd of local fishers, who were simultaneously fascinated and grossed out by the sight of two Asian guys gorging themselves on the roe. (At this point in the story my mom, a public health nurse, always starts scolding Dad for a) disregarding possible health hazards due to possible sewage disposal hazards, b) making a spectacle of himself without being invited to partake by the locals themselves, and c) hanging around with that friend (whom she disapproves of).)

By the way, the last time I had any significant amount of Japanese unagi was several years ago, when my then-landlady, in her late 70s, was preparing to move back to her family in Ontario. When we were cleaning out her kitchen cupboards, we found a dusty old tin of unagi that a Japanese visitor had left behind. We opened it up and shared it over hot rice, with lightly-boiled spinach (in sesame sauce) on the side. Until then, I'd only had scraps of unagi (rolled into a large "futomaki" roll, with egg, mushroom, kampyo gourd, spinach, and that pink fish powder).

[TahitiNut]

15. That's cute. Love it. I also love the spinach & sesame Japanese style.

Yummy!! Now I'm getting a miso-Jones. (I can't go a month without a sushi/miso/cha 'fix' anymore.)




Yum!!

[Lisa]

16. we play mix-and-match with spinach, or green beans ...

.... and either miso or sesame sauce. My landlady taught me some of her favorite recipes before she left, and I try them out a few times a month, to keep in practice! Sometimes I make sushi for a friend, who's diabetic, and has a very limited list of things she can eat (I mix brown rice in with the regular rice).

[Tesha]

26. We'll take your left-over Uni! (NT)

[WinkyDink]

19. "Not bad..."? I think eel is great! A staple in my childhood, on Christmas Eve.

[TahitiNut]

12. I visited eel farms in Tahiti when I was there.

It's a significant export. (Yechh!)

[ozone_man]

17. European and American eels spawn in Sargasso sea.

I always thought this was amazing. And they swim into fresh water, slithering into lakes and ponds I doubt is possible for most fish. One time I observed what I though were snakes wriggling up a very small stream, toward a pond with a 10' dam. As I recall they made it (over land). Time to give them the protection they need.

http://www.fws.gov/northeast/ameel/

"American eels begin their lives as eggs hatching in the Sargasso Sea, a 2-million-square-mile warm-water lens in the North Atlantic between the West Indies and the Azores. They take years to reach freshwater streams where they mature, and then they return to their Sargasso Sea birth waters to spawn and die. They are the only species of freshwater eels in the Western Hemisphere.

Eels have been a part of the human diet, especially in Europe and Asia, for hundreds and even thousands of years. European eels are facing extinction; their population has crashed over the last 20 years, possibly as much as 99 percent. American eels, too, have been especially impacted by dams and other obstructions in rivers, hydropower plants, and especially overfishing."

[Lisa]

18. there's even a special name for this -- "catadromous"

Those types of eels, which are born in salt water and then mature in fresh water, are the opposite to "anadromous" fish like salmon (which are born in fresh water streams, then migrate to the ocean to grow up). Many other species cannot survive if moved to water which is more or less saline than their usual habitat ... it requires special adaptations. I agree, it's pretty cool!

[ozone_man]

21. I'll salt that one away.

I checked the elevation of the NY lake in my memory. It was 1100ft. I think an inclined side overflow (eel ladder of sorts) to the dam allowed the eels to wriggle up into the lake. I was probably out doing some swimming or fishing, but I couldn't believe what I was seeing. All the way from the Sargasso sea.

I guess the big eel that I caught while striper fishing was on his way back to spawn. A 5lb. eel can give you quite a fight, plus getting him in to shore is only have the battle. What to do with him then? Not a sriped bass, but dinner nontheless. :)

Like sharks, we need to give these amazing fish the protection they need to thrive again.

[Lisa]

24. I suppose it's possible that there could be landlocked populations?

That's happened to salmon too -- there's a landslide that cuts off the river or lake from ocean access, say, and that particular population spends its life cycle in freshwater from then on. Some biologists I know were studying salmonid populations in the Arctic, and found several lakes like that. They seem to recall that they even found cod that had adapted to freshwater conditions, after an arm of the sea got cut off and turned into a lake.

[ozone_man]

25. I guess you're right.

They can be landlocked like salmon. Although I looked up the small lake (on topozone) where I saw them swimming upstream and followed the stream source eventually to the Hudson River. I think they swam all the way up and watching them in that final effort up to the lake was convincing. Salmon just wouldn't have enough depth of water to do that. ;)

[Lisa]

28. if there were a bunch of them, I bet they were migrating from the ocean ...

From what I've heard, landlocked populations would tend to be smaller and not as numerous (due to limited carrying capacity, etc.). So I suspect that you were watching the last stage in a long and exhausting migration! Way cool.

Sometimes in the fall, I go down to our local creek here on the west coast, and watch the salmon coming home to spawn. I always wonder how where they've been during the intervening years. (I suppose that radiotagging is clearing up that kind of mystery, though I don't think anyone's been monitoring our local sockeye population -- less important economically than the huge Fraser runs.)

[ozone_man]

29. Also, there are two spawning regions in Sargasso sea.

The European eel, which is more threatened apparently spawns NE of the American eel in the Sargasso sea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history

They seem to have quite an overland capability, and underground too.

They can wind themselves over wet grass and dig through wet sand underground for 30 miles to reach upstream headwaters and ponds, colonising the continent. In fresh water they develop pigmentation, turn into elvers (young eels) and feed on creatures like small crustaceans, worms and insects. They grow up in 10 or 14 years to a length of 60 to 80 cm. In this stage they are now called yellow eels because of their golden pigmentation.

I followed the stream (on Topozone) from the lake source I saw them in (850' elevation), and it was stream all the way to larger streams and then the Hudson, no lakes in between even, so I guess they came all the way up. I forget what time of year it was. Quite a long time ago. One more reason to get rid of dams or at least provide fish ladders.

The males don't get as large as the females, so the one I caught salt water fishing was a female. The only American eel I ate, but it was very good. Recently in Patagonia, I had a tasty fish called Congrio. I had it twice, but it wasn't until I got back to the states that I found out what it was, a very big eel (conger), up to 3 meters. Now I feel kind of bad that I ate such a cool fish.


"Immortalized by Pablo Neruda in his Elementos Odas'"Oda al Caldillo de Congrio," this classic fish soup of the Chilean coast is simple, tasty, and filling. If you first read Neruda's poem, though, you will cook it up in a haze of pleasure and dine on it in heaven. If you want to add potatoes for heartiness, cook them, diced, in a little fish stock until tender and add with the fish. Serve hot to 4 as a meal, ideally with lots of crusty bread and good Chilean wine."
http://www.soupsong.com/rconger.html

[flvegan]

20. It's not "food" it's a supplement.

It's eaten to build stamina and combat lethargy, not keep folks alive.

Big difference.

[Bonobo]

23. Huh? What do you mean it's a supplement?

[AtomicKitten]

22. stop overfishing

and quit cutting fins off of sharks and dumping them back into the sea to die

thank you

[Nihil]

27. No need to panic ... they'll just introduce the "scientific research" fishing boats.

It's not as if the Japanese government or fishing industries have
ever taken any notice of conservation issues in the past ...
why think they'll start now?
:shrug: