Conversion

Last night I went to Whole Foods to return that despicable Allegro coffee and stopped by the seafood counter because my son wants seafood salad.  My plan was to buy a half pound of the shrimp and a package of the imitation crab meat. 

There was whole boneless trout for $7.99/lb that I thought would be nice fried with some grits for breakfast.  The only drawback was that it was farm raised...and that has nothing on wild caught trout.  But supposedly the trout is farmed in conditions that mimic a running stream, so I went for it and it was delicious. 

On my way home I stopped at Fresh Grocer for Hellman's mayonnaise....I took a look at their seafood counter.  Everything looked so dead.  There was wild caught fillets of silver and rainbow trout that were unimpressive and there was the whole boneless trout at the same $7.99 price point.  But it looked lifeless.

I can't seem to figure out why inferior food (fish, meat, produce) hovers around the same price as more wholesome and sustainably produced food.  I'm now even more cautious than before about farm raised fish.  My concern about the fish was basically the same as the feedlot cattle - an unnatural diet of grains and hormones coupled with overcrowding mitigated by antibiotics.  Well it's worst than I thought.  Whole Foods statement about tilapia sex-reversal prompted me to do a little investigating.

I remember when tilapia first hit the supermarkets 15 years ago - it was a delicate fish that was almost a delicacy, now it's omnipresent.  It's native to Africa but is now being farmed all over the world.  It has become the "Factory Fish."  But there are a couple of problems with that - it's almost nutritionally useless; it's environmentally degradative; and this sex-reversal thing sounds like frankenscience.  Mixed-sexed ponds can become overcrowded due to reproduction - this adversely impacts the size of the fish.  The solution is to feed the fish a synthetic sex hormone (or use hybrids) to produce an all male population that can grow to a large size for the market. 

We need to get the food system back to the basics - not only are we engineering chickens to grow faster and have larger breasts but we are meddling with animal reproduction.  Dairy cows are getting hormones to increase lactation and we are reversing the sex of tilapia to meet the demands of the market.  Is anyone concerned that this might adversely affect humans?

While I may have converted to the farm raised rainbow trout at Whole Foods, I'm literally scared to death of tilapia.