Talk:Fish (food)/Archive 1

Archive 1

Toxins in fish

This has definately been overlooked. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I know that many fish, including salmon and particularly, tuna, are contaminated with mercury, PCBs, and dioxins. Some say it's not safe to eat a lot of fish.

If I had the time I'd be researching on it myself.

For such an important food source, this page is really neglected. I'd like to see more entries to foods with fish as a major ingrediant. And perhaps more about the history of people eating fish. Haoie 23:55, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

It's still a relatively new article, having split off from Fish only a few days ago. It'll grow in time. You are, of course, more than welcome to contribute any information you have on the topic. --Icarus 05:48, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

OK, I've added a short list of commonly eaten species. Haoie 00:40, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Fish blood/lymph?

Hi,

I just had a discussion with two coworkers today regarding my salmon I brought for lunch. When you cook a piece of red meat, some of the blood comes to the surface, and forms a greyish gelatinous substance. Perhaps 'gelatinous' is misleading, as it's certainly not like Jell-o, but I think you know what I'm talking about. When I cook a fish, I gain the same thing, though it is white. Is this blood or lymph, or something altogether different?

Also, as a fish does have a circulatory system, however primitive, it must have capillaries throughout the flesh in order to provide oxygen and nutrients to the rest of the body, right? In that case, is there simply no iron in the blood at that point, or is there another reason we don't see red capillaries throughout the flesh?

Just curious, and hoping you can help!

Daria

I don't have a source, but I'm 90% sure I remember reading somewhere that crabs, at least, have some other metal as the predominant metal in their blood. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for many other aquatic animals as well. The red color is caused by the same process as rust, exposure to oxygen, so the color of oxygenated blood would corrospond to whatever metal they had. I don't know if any animals have aluminum as their main metal, but that's the only metal I can remember the color of oxidation for (except, of course, iron) so I'll use it as an example: an animal which had aluminum for its predominant blood metal would appear to have black blood when it was oxygenated. --Icarus 05:31, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Freshness of fish?

Kind of a small article for something as important as this. Maybe someone could add a paragraph about factors that determine how fresh a fish is, how common it is to find unfresh fish in supermarkets (which freeze their fish for long periods of time and are still legally allowed to call it "fresh"), and how it's possible to tell whether a fish is fresh or not. I don't really know anything about that, but if anyone does, then it would be a neat addition. --Michiel Sikma 13:46, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Fishes¹?

can we please just call them fish(pl), fishes just sounds so wrong--Sir.Salmon Fish^{The First} 15:00, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Fish (as a plural) refers to multiple organisms, fishes to multiple species of fish. Each should be used where correct. The difference is similar to people and peoples.Emmett5 01:04, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Canned Fish

I've read that canned/tinned Tuna is compressed prior to canning to extract oils, thus removing a nutritional component. Are other fish treated thus or is Tuna oil especially valuable ?

Declining stocks

Recently there was well-publicized research on declining fish stocks, notably the assertion that wild fish will no longer be available 50 years from now [1]. A-giau 10:27, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I think a section on environmental effects and overfishing is definitely lacking in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.206.92.56 (talk) 16:45, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Merge

Propose merge with Seafood as the content is redundant. Isopropyl 04:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Disagree. If the contents of the two articles are redundant, then they both need rewriting. Merge is not the solution as both are different subjects. A lot of food fish are not seafood (tilapia, catfish, etc.) while seafood includes many non-fish food sources. --Melanochromis 05:34, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I have noticed that on the Fish (food) page it says fish is different from seafood. Yet on the seafood site fish is included. If we can get this issue cleared up then we can move on I feel. Cls14 12:35, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good. This isn't really my specialty :) Isopropyl 13:33, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

I would merge Fresh fish with this article. I don't think there's a need for a separate article. This one could have more information about the freshness of fish and risks of eating fish that aren't fresh. HyborianRanger (talk) 03:23, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Recommending Fish as food

"Fish, especially saltwater fish, is high in Omega 3 fatty acids, which are heart-friendly, and a regular diet of fish is highly recommended."

Does anyone know a source we can quote for this. I am going to reword this to 'highly recommended by many nutritionists.' but we need a source to verify it - am putting: http://www.med.umich.edu/umim/clinical/pyramid/fish.htm on it at the moment (don't think it's an amazing source, but it's a start).

'Common'ly eaten fish

Any site to verify and better clarify the commonly eaten fish? It'd be great if we could have a chart in there as well. Pritchard 00:24, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Citation offered for "Citation Needed" re: fish~shellfish

Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Eidtion (accessed as CD-ROM via OED Software v3.1)

Fish n1
  I. 1.  a. In popular language, any animal living exclusively in the water; primarily denoting vertebrate animals provided with fins and destitute of limbs; 
  but extended to include various cetaceans, crustaceans, molluscs, etc.

I'd have amened the article myself but I'm not up to speed on doing it right and don't have the time right now...

Julian I Do Stuff 10:57, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Food fish

Would it be appropriate to create a redirect page for Food fish and direct it here? This article already has a food fish section. I would recommend that a third paragraph be added in the opening, describing the concept of food fish, and then to bulk up the common food fish section a bit. There are countless references to food fish in Wikipedia, yet there is no article. The Fish article makes no mention of food fish or big game fish as subcategories of fish. I think it would be a good fit, but I defer to your judgment. --Pat (talk) 08:16, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I see that it comes up as a redirect to Seafood. I searched it earlier, but I guess I needed to capitalize it for it to appear. I think it should redirect here personally, as seafood is a subset of Fish (food).--Pat (talk) 08:20, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

"Bromium"

What the hell is "bromium"? An internet search turns up a bunch of homeopathic medicine results. Did the author mean bromine? Attys (talk) 19:38, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Someone apparently corrected it. But bromine and chlorine are still listed under "heavy metals" while they're clearly non-metallic. 178.26.171.11 (talk) 22:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Nutrition

The nutrition section violates NPOV and lacks sufficient citations. --N-k (talk) 01:22, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup needed

Article needs some cleanup and I don't personally have the time to do it. The list of toxins in fish, starting with mercury, should all be under one heading or, at most, two. There's no reason for there to be 4 sections that read just like this:
"Lead
Besides mercury, lead is also frequently found in fish."
And statements like this need to be avoided:
"Even Japanese people never eat raw salmon and ikura, and even if they seem raw, these foods are not raw but are frozen overnight to prevent infections from parasites, particularly anisakis." Nice.

Schwin47 (talk) 18:49, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Undiscussed deletions and changes

@ Macrakis (talk · contribs): Please read WP:BRD. When you boldly change long standing text in an article and your changes are reverted, the next appropriate step is that you to come to the talk page and discuss why you wanted to make the changes. Instead, you reverted again and demanded that I start the discussion. That is aggressive and is edit warring, so this discussion is off to a bad start.

You replaced, without explanation...

Some languages distinguish between fish as an animal and the food prepared from it. However in other languages, such as English and French, this distinction is not made, and the same word is used to refer to both a live fish in the ocean and the food prepared from it. In English this applies also to chicken but not to pigs (pork) or cows (beef).

with (the ungrammatical)...

English calls foods made of marine animals in general seafood, but does not have a specific term for foods made of fish as opposed to live fish. Some languages distinguish between fish as an animal and the food prepared from it.

When you reverted, you commented in your edit summary, "I don't see the need to refer to pig/pork in this context; also, why suppress the term "seafood"?" You make not have noticed, but the article is titled "fish (food)", which means the article is about fish as food, and not about the more general topic of seafood. There is a separate article which deals with seafood. At the very beginning of the article on fish as a food there is hat note referring readers to the more general article on seafood. So your comment that the term "seafood" as been "suppressed" is plain nonsense. I wrote most of the article on seafood, so why would I "suppress" it.

Secondly, you say you "don't see the need to refer to pig/pork in this context", so you removed the sentence; "In English this applies also to chicken but not to pigs (pork) or cows (beef)". Well to me, that is a highly relevant sentence, drawing appropriate parallels illustrating where this double referral does and doesn't happen in English. It is not a referral to pigs and pork as such, but a referral to the way the terms are used, which is very much to the point.

Thirdly, you replaced, without any rationale, the statement "However in other languages, such as English and French, this distinction is not made" with "Some languages{{which?}} distinguish between fish as an animal and the food prepared from it". Well, there is nothing wrong with inverting the statement in this way, if you feel there is some improvement. But what improvement? The original version was backed with examples, but your version is not backed with any examples. Then you have the gall to add a {{which?}} tag to your own version, apparently expecting someone else to find the examples you apparently can't be bothered to find yourself. Why should someone else have to jump to the crack of your whip, and do that work for you when the original version was fine as it was?

Please revert your reversion. --Epipelagic (talk) 02:22, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Epipelagic, thanks for responding on Talk. I certainly have no intention of edit warring. Let's discuss substance.

The old text read "Some languages distinguish between fish as an animal and the food prepared from it". This is plausible, but there is no evidence given for it. If there are no such languages, it seems pointless to say that English does not make this distinction. One might as well say "English and French do not distinguish between hammers used for nailing, hammers used for the sport of hammer throwing, and hammers used for murdering members of rival gangs." This is all true, but uninteresting unless there are prominent examples of languages which do distinguish them, which is why I thought it was useful to point out the problem. That is, the original text had a problem.

Moreover, English actually does use a broader term, "seafood", to speak of fish as well as other marine animals, treated as food. It seems strange not to mention this in this context. As for pork/pig, etc., yes, perhaps one example could be useful, but it might be simpler to link culinary names -- an article which, by the way, could definitely use some reliable sources....

I will revert for now. I look forward to moving towards a resolution here on the Talk page. --Macrakis (talk) 03:24, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

I've thought about what you said and have rewritten the section. How does it sit with you now? --Epipelagic (talk) 07:30, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your rewrite. I've made some minor stylistic changes. Are you sure the distinction fisch/speisefisch in is "fish in the sea" vs. "fish on the table"? My German isn't great, but I suspect it's more like "fish in general" vs. "food fish" (that is, fish that is suitable to eat). But maybe that's a quibble. Does 'seafood' cover non-animals (e.g. laver?) -- not sure. --Macrakis (talk) 13:45, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's good. I'm not sure about the linguistic subtleties either. Pescado may refer more strictly to landed fish that are edible, rather than fish on a plate. But the Spanish Wikipedia uses it as the title for its article on fish as food, just as the German Wikipedia uses Speisefisch as the title of its article on fish as food. "Seafood" is food taken from the sea, though the usage varies somewhat. Some countries include freshwater fish and crustaceans. In English speaking countries seaweed is not a staple part of the diet the way it is in some Asian countries, which is maybe why you find including plants somewhat surprising. Nonetheless, it is still classified as a seafood in commercial circles. I don't agree with using Culinary name as a reference. The article doesn't even mention the distinction between pigs and pork, and even if it did, Wikipedia articles cannot be used as reliable source. --Epipelagic (talk) 19:50, 28 November 2011 (UTC)