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Completely Farm-Bred Unagi, a World First
JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese scientists at the National Research Institute of Aquaculture, Fisheries Research Agency have reported that they successfully completed an artificial cultivation cycle for unagi, or eel — a world first. Unagi is a traditional delicacy in Japan, and can commonly be found in baked form at sushi restaurants. The fish has long been caught either matured, or still young and then fattened on farms. Sadly, as a result, natural stocks of unagi have plummeted in recent years. However, the research news indicates a future method to completely farm breed the tasty creature in mass quantity. Good news for sushi lovers, Japanese businesses, and wild eel alike."
They can farm-grow total awareness now? /got nuthin'
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Good news for sushi-lovers, Japanese businesses, and wild eel alike.
In the US Pacific Northwest, it has been found that farm raising salmon significantly hurt the wild populations.
Some of those farmed fish can escape affect the gene pool!
I saw a couple minutes of an episode of Dirty Jobs recently. At first I thought Mike Rowe was sifting through a table of entrails. It was actually a table full of slime and Unagi. Apparently they excrete slime.
Salmon farm fishing is a disaster. Shrimp are not much better. I don't know how the tilapia production is fairing. Tilapia are not predators like salmon, so I imagine it might be better, but I have no idea.
Answer: stop eating fish. Sorry.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Chinese have them beat: all things four-legged other than table (some like that).
But hey, we eat haggis, lutefisk, scrapple, prarie oyster, head cheese, rotting cheese. We're up there.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Making statements on Japanese culture based on Iron Chef is only slightly less ridiculous than basing it based on Dragonball Z. Your average Japanese person probably hasn't eaten fish ice cream. The point of the show is to show off creativity in cooking, so you get dishes that have never before seen a dinner plate and probably never will again. Iron Chef America makes some crazy dishes, I'd be surprised if there hasn't been some type of meat ice cream or sorbet on it (I wouldn't know, I could never get into the American version).
True, they eat some seafood that we don't. Why anyone decided squid was a good thing to fry up on a stick and eat is beyond me, and I was quite weirded out to see octopus tentacle in a supermarket. But most of the odd Japanese foods are seafood, which makes sense considering how much coast they have. If you ask me, eating unagi is much more sane than eating sheep heart, liver and lungs (aka haggis). And I really don't want to know what parts of the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
Anyway in my experience, they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes "like the dentists office" whatever that means. So there's at least one food that we eat that weirds them out.
What's this we shit? You got a mouse in your pocket?
I've been to Scotland - I took one look at haggis and I suddenly didn't feel so international anymore.
FTA: "...a means to save the animal from overfishing and possible extinction have been found. "
Actually, it's cheaper and better to simply stop fishing for them altogether for a few years. Just leave them alone and they'll come back reasonably quick, if you haven't, y'know, BUILT OVER their spawning beds or anything.
[End Of Line]
What I was saying, was that some of us, you know, Royal We, right?
How did you know about the mouse?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Some people are just unadventurous or don't know where to find interesting foods. I've had everything you've mentioned there locally here in California (except the haggis, which I had in Scotland).
I'm actually not fond of root beer either... i guess its taste does resemble the pink mouthwash that some dentists use.
If you think the fish ice cream is weird, you should try a meat cocktail (as in the alcoholic type served at a bar)...
Follow me
I guess there's a small lamprey of hope for this fishery.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
the fact is the japanese are into anything and everything, as proof i'll refer you to some crap called "swollows nest". i found the following description:
"The swiftlet lives in dark caves, using a method of echolocation similar to the bat to get around. Instead of twigs and straw, the swiftlet makes its nest from strands of its own gummy saliva, which hardens when exposed to air."
I doubt any westerner would see that on the side of a cave wall and think "YUM that looks like food"
dont' get me wrong, i love oriental foods ( i went to a japanese resturant just 2 weeks ago). but they are definately more out there when it comes to what they will eat then we are.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Next time you go there, ask for sea slug. Hmm.... sea slug...
That bird nest thing was Chinese, I thought.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The pilgrims and native Americans had eel during the first Thanksgiving.
Maybe now I'll be able to get properly prepared fresh eel instead of that frozen, precooked, and precut crap that's reheated in a toaster oven and covered with sesame seeds.
Swallow's nest is a Chinese dish, not Japanese. And if I've understood it right, it's kind of a "stunt" dish in China as well.
"but they are definately more out there when it comes to what they will eat then we are."
I'm Swedish, and whenever conversation with some Japanese colleague or new acquaintance is about food, the subject invariably drifts to surströmming (sour herring), which they find inexplicable that anyone would eat. Food being "out there" is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
idunno, but eating the dry spittle of some cave dwelling bird seems universally unappealing. if you've ever seen the mess of feathers and shit in a birds nest you'll understand.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Answer: stop eating fish. Sorry.
Partly, but not completely. I highly recommend the book "Bottomfeeder" that covers this topic quite well:
http://www.tarasgrescoe.com/excerpt.html
The author recommends the following kinds if you want to eat sustainably:
There are also many ones that he recommends with provisos (e.g., shrimp, when farmed, are often treated with chemicals and shrimp farms are seriously messing many of the world's poorest countries (e.g., Thailand); farmed shrimp from Mexico though are actually one of the most responsibly produced).
In general though a lot of the fish stocks are close to collapse in many parts of the world.
Highly recommend you check out the book, and at only ~300 pages, it's quick, informative read.
Oh. I don't eat ferret, either.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The OP mentions sushi and unagi. Unagi is traditionally served on a bowl rice in a donburi style, not as sushi. .. one is from the sea.
You shouldn't be able to find unagi in a Japanese sushi restaurant in Japan. You should find anago. One is from a river
Western sushi shops sell unagi since anago is rarely exported from japan.
each country has dishs that are odd for sure, but for pure volume of strange, it's hard to beat asians.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If you think root beer tastes like the dentist's office, I'd say you're drinking the wrong root beer . . . and you should seriously reconsider allowing your dentist to put you under at your next cleaning.
"each country has dishs that are odd for sure, but for pure volume of strange, it's hard to beat asians."
What, Asia is one country? You are collecting the weird foods of forty-odd different nations with completely different cultures spread over half the world and comparing to the foods of your own home.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
For what its worth, Eel consumption is also rather common in any area of Europe where Eel happens to be found, its not at all some "crazy" unique Japanese thing.
> i swear that culutre would eat anything, they make fish ice cream
Yeah? Less than two days ago my sister was talking about how she wanted to try the chocolate-covered bacon recipe she saw in a Taste of Home magazine. Chocolate-covered bacon, no fooling. My dad said hey, if you're going to do that, why not take the idea to its logical conclusion and make bacon s'mores?
Every country has some weird cuisine.
Not that I'm volunteering to eat sushi. I like my fish cooked, thank you very much.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> But hey, we eat haggis, lutefisk, scrapple, prarie oyster,
> head cheese, rotting cheese. We're up there.
Who is "we", exactly? I take it you're from Scotland (haggis), Scandinavia (lutefisk), *and* France (rotting cheese)? And where on earth do a significant percentage of the population eat head cheese or scrapple, to say nothing of "prairie oysters"? Nowhere, to my knowledge.
Speaking as a Midwesterner, the weirdest thing "we" eat (and it should be noted that I personally don't) is probably ranch dressing (a condiment made from thickened seasoned buttermilk, commonly eaten on lettuce-based salads; about a quarter of the population will voluntarily eat the stuff).
People from other parts of the country actually make fun of us for how tame our cuisine is. The standard joke is, in Ohio there are only three spices: salt, cinnamon, and ketchup. (This is an exaggeration, of course. We also put tiny amounts of ground cloves, nutmeg, or ginger in certain kinds of baked goods, and a few people even put black pepper on their food.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Unagi is a key ingredient in Unagi Pai, which I think is the yummiest cookie made with ground-up eel bones in the whole world. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I had never heard of surströmming before. And after reading about it on Wikipedia I think I'm going to throw up. I'll never think again of Sweden as a civilized place. :(
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
So is *this* finally an example of something the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is in charge of? Because I know we ruled out their authority with respect to Gundum.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
asia is a continent not a country.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
now if they can only do the same thing for bluefin tuna, while it's still extant.
私のホーバークラフトは、鰻でいっぱいです。
... like the body or the subject!)"
Does slashdot not like Japanese?
"Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
> And I really don't want to know what parts of
... basically, it's meat. Not the highly-prized breast meat, but still meat.
> the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
It's probably not as bad as you might think.
It's not the breast meat, obviously, because there's too much market for that as chicken breasts. That's the most commercially valuable portion (probably mostly because of the way it's one great big piece with no bones and usually not too much fat). About 70% of the chicken meat that's sold as whole pieces, at least around here, is breast meat, even though it's about 20% of the meat on the chicken. The remainder of many of those chickens is left over, so it goes into processed chicken.
Most of the rest of the chicken meat that's sold separately as whole pieces is drumsticks, sometimes with thighs attached, sometimes not. And lately restaurants have been selling a lot of Buffalo wings.
But the other edible meat parts are not so prized for sale as separate pieces, so they mostly end up in processed chicken, including nuggets. So you're looking at the back, as much of the neck meat as they can easily get off the bones, a few of the thighs and legs,
The worse thing about processed chicken is the fact that it's usually breaded and deep fried.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
If anyone can beat the japanese, it's the Icelanders. Hakarl? Svid? I'll eat the "weird" things in the back of my local chinese deli, but I draw the line at icelandic rotted shark meat.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
> they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes
> "like the dentists office" whatever that means
I bet I can guess.
Flouride, in the kinds of concentrations that are needed to make an effective twice-a-year fluoride treatment, such as the one a dentist might give you as a child, has a fairly strong taste, which is widely considered unpleasant. In an attempt to make it more palatable, it is often "covered up" with strong food-treat flavors. The most popular flavor for this is a flavor called "bubble gum", but root beer is another one that sometimes gets used, and there are a couple of others as well. I think "grape" (like a cheap purple popsicle, not the flavor of actual grapes) might be another.
Note that the bubble-gum fluoride treatments don't taste all that much like bubble gum, and the root beer ones don't taste all that much like root beer, and so on. The fluoride taste is unmistakably still present in all of them. But there *is* some resemblance to the nominal flavor, perhaps enough that, if you'd had the fluoride treatments repeatedly and learned to hate them before encountering bubble gum or root beer for the first time, you might have a negative reaction.
American kids, of course, have all had bubble gum and root beer many times before they ever have the fluoride treatments, so they don't make the backwards association.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
There is nothing in Haggis that can't be found in a Big Mac.
There is nothing in Haggis that can't be found in a Big Mac.
A better argument for not eating McDonald's fast food I've never heard. :-)
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Once you are done with relieving your stomach, google for a description of Nenets dish called kopalhem. Bon appetit!
Making statements on Japanese culture based on Iron Chef is only slightly less ridiculous than basing it based on Dragonball Z.
You mean to tell me the Japanese don't secretly have monkey tails coiled up underneath their clothes, and that Sony is not a front for their quest for magical orbs?
Honestly, haggis is pretty good. Just don't think about what it's made of and you'll be fine.
The closest .us analog would be a spicy meatloaf - the textures are nearly identical.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The problem with farmed fish is that their environment is not as varied and robust, as diverse, as the natural one they evolved to thrive in. Which is why salmon farms, for example, breed unhealthier fish, and not infrequently collapse. Even land farms turn into incubators for very serious diseases, like mad cow etc.
Free range farming is the most sustainable. When the eel population collapses, there's more going wrong than just less eels for our sushi. The canary in the coal mine problem isn't fixed by simply keeping canaries in zoos.
--
make install -not war
There's nothing strange about unagi. Really, even the summary's characterization of it as a "delicacy" is inaccurate. In fact, any American sushi fan has eaten it many, many times.
Property is theft.
That's entirely a matter of taste, and not all of us enjoy fish (of any kind).
True, they eat some seafood that we don't.
The Japanese will eat absolutely anything that comes out of the sea so long as they have at least a good chance of not being poisoned to death by it if prepared properly. It's a kind of charming part of their culture, really.
Why anyone decided squid was a good thing to fry up on a stick and eat is beyond me
I dunno, this looks kinda tasty, doesn't it? I'd give it a try.
Actually, I gave squid sushi a try not that long ago. It was ika-geso (squid legs) that looked not entirely unlike this except it was nigiri (some rice beneath it). It was kind of tasty and there was nothing gross about it. In retrospect, it seems silly now to be squeamish about it.
Property is theft.
> Just don't think about what it's made of and you'll be fine.
I dunno, just looking at the haggis recipe makes me want to try it - looks tasty to me...
I suspect that in my country (Malaysia), they often have to import MSM and similar stuff to make nuggets, sausages etc - because over here stuff like liver, gizzards, lungs, stomach etc can just be packed just the way beef cuts and chicken wings are, and sold at supermarkets. People actually buy that stuff "as is". No need for disguise...
A fair number of people here know the difference in taste and textures of cooked liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, stomach (apparently there are different "kitchen" names for the different stomachs too ) etc.
"bird's nest" aka dried caked swiftlet saliva is not a stunt dish in China.
:).
:).
It's supposedly a health food. A popular ingredient in various traditional chinese concoctions (food/drink) for post-partum mothers.
Dried saliva does have a high protein content and other stuff. I don't know whether it really is good for health
As for stunt dishes, I sometimes think that a lot of foods/dishes were probably invented/discovered by young men under the influence of alcohol...
"Oh crap, looks like it's gone bad or something. Sure looks strange".
"Hey Johansson/Wong/Sato/Sanna, I dare you to eat this".
"Yeah, I bet he won't dare".
Johansson/Wong/Sato/Sanna: "Oh yeah? How much?".
Or very hungry people.
I wonder which category casu marzu falls in
But do you love them on the inside?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The locals in Gloucestershire have been priced out of the market by the Japanese... we cannot enjoy any elvers because the Japanese buyers come in and pay such ridiculous prices for fresh caught elvers that poaching is rife and the elver catch has crashed as a result... the current price is approx £250 a kilo!!!
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Hell yeah, unagi is my absolute favorite sushi of all time. If you've never had it, find a good sushi place and try it (emphasis on 'good'). And since it's actually served cooked, you wussies can't complain :P It's also served with an absolutely delicious teriyaki sauce.
Close behind that one: ama ebi ^_^
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Unagi infestations are actually a HUGE problem along the U.S. gulf coast! A long time ago, some enterprising farmer tried raising unagi for the Japanese-American market, and some managed to escape. They are now a huge problem in places like Florida and Alabama, where they outcompete and kill off native fish species, foul nets, etc. They're considered a massive pest fish and there have long been attempts at finding ways to poison them, etc.
A much better solution would be to just eat the damn things. We can export tons of these wild unagi to the Japanese if we decide to. There is currently NO shortage of them.
You don't have to go to Malaysia for that - everything on your list, except possibly for pancreas, can be had at my butcher round the corner here in Germany, and is part of the regional cuisine. All that and kidneys, calf thymus, brains and whatnot. Is the idea that innards are somewhat disgusting an American thing or something? The more common ones like liver are found on basically every menu around here, and lung is considered the local speciality ("Saures Lüngerl" - sour lung):
Fry sliced carrots, celery, onions, parsley root and leek in butter, add the finely sliced calf lung and fry shortly, dust with some flour then add calf fond and vinegar, season with salt, pepper, a bit of sugar, clovers, one or two bay leaves and cook for 60-80 minutes. Let it cool down and store it in the fridge for a day before reheating, reseasoning (especially with some more vinegar to get the right sour taste) and serving. Serve with dumplings. Great stuff. The important thing is to remove all the hard cartilaginous parts of the lung when slicing it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
What amuses me is how people will be disgusted by perfectly good haggis, but will happily wolf down inhuman quantities of industrially-produced meat grown in utterly sickening conditions. Boiled offal is bad, but chicken soaking in its own shit and disease-ridden pigs that need a constant stream of drugs to keep them alive are delicious?
Hard to beat the west really. The periods of deformed chickens are a staple at breakfast, and mouldy milk is considered a delicacy, especially when washed down with rancid grape juice.
It's usually mechanically-reclaimed meat, i.e. stuff that's hosed off the bone at high pressure through a sieve, resulting in a sort of slurry/paste.
Not anything: The Chasers War On Everything.
It's probably more important to ensure the lung is unrecognisable and drowned in vinegar (or in the case of haggis, whisky.)
;-)
The same goes for the Aussie "meat" pie - finely chop/mince the "meat", smother it in gravy, conceal it in pastry, drown in tomato/HP/BBQ sauce. You'd almost think it was edible.
Wait, when did they start putting black pepper in Big Macs? I call shenanigans...
Blue cheese seems to be produced in most Western European countries. Just looking through a list of blue cheeses on Wikipedia gives you Denmark, Italy, England, Spain and Finland in addition to France.
We usually drown it in beer during consumption around here ;) On the serious side, as with most innards, preparation is anything - if done wrong, sour lung can be a gristly, vile gruel, if done done right, an absolute delicacy.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
What exactly is "rotten" about blue cheese? The fact that it contains a microorganism? Can as well say goodbye to beer, bread and yogurt too, then. Some red-culture cheese like Munster might border on "rotten" if you go after the smell of a *really* ripe one - still damn tasty stuff, though.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
If you find the grilled squid skewers on that picture tasty, I can only recommend to try it the Mediterranean way. Just grill the whole squid over charcoals, occasionally applying olive oil with garlic to it. Salt and pepper to taste, serve with a bowl of good, dark-green, fruity olive oil and a dash of lemon. Exquisite stuff.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
> It's usually mechanically-reclaimed meat
Well, yes, obviously.
In the first place it wouldn't be economic in the developed world to pay someone to manually pick all the meat off the bones piece by piece.
Additionally, many Americans these days would also consider it unsanitary because oh, no, someone might have *touched* the meat, and it might have been up to five minutes since their last mandated use of hand sanitizer, and ewwww, gross, food isn't supposed to be *touched*. (This attitude is especially prevalent among people who mostly eat processed foods. People who eat a lot of home-cooked food are much less squeamish about such things, but those people aren't the main market for chicken nuggets.) If word got out that the meat were picked off the bones by hand, there could be a negative impact on sales. It's not worth the risk, especially when mechanical reclamation is so much cheaper anyway.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> What exactly is "rotten" about blue cheese?
Technically, blue cheese isn't rotten as such. It's moldy. Limburger is rotten.
However, the distinction between "rotten" and "moldy" is lost on most Americans. And frankly, although I understand the distinction, I'm not sure I can say which is more distasteful. Neither is appetizing.
I like a fair variety of cheeses. Off the top of my head I like cheddar (either mild or sharp), colby, longhorn, provolone, monterrey jack (including pepperjack), brick, motzarella, grated parmesan or romano, muenster, white American, and even some yellow American (but NOT the processed kind that comes in individually wrapped slices; that stuff just tastes fake, I'm sorry). I can even put up with a little Velveeta if it's baked into something that also has other cheeses in it (like cheddar for instance).
But for all the variety, these cheeses that I like all have something in common: the culture is run to the point where the cheese is finished, and then it's halted (usually by heating), and any further steps are taken that are needed (such as pressing or draining) to complete the process. Only after this is the finished cheese shipped to the store, where you buy it, and it's NOT actively going bad. You don't find yourself saying things like, "Get the cheese to sickbay. The doctor should examine it immediately."
Ah, well. People from some cultures (e.g., Korea) have been known to opine that all cheese is spoiled and nasty and that nobody in their right mind would want to eat it on purpose. So I guess that makes my position on cheese a moderate, centrist position, eh?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Well, you take the centrist position, I'll be the extremist on the opposite site of the Koreans then. Haven't met a cheese too... biologically active... for me. Although I'd draw the line at casu marzu. Can't see why you don't like Limburger if you like Muenster, though - both are red-culture cheese with a thriving Brevibacterium culture on it. I generally don't find it necessary to halt the culture in any way - for certain kinds of cheese you just need a decent dealer who knows how to store them and who sells them too you at the exactly correct point of ripeness. Take it home, eat it. Stopping the culture by heating would not work with some sorts. Anyway, too each his own, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
However, the distinction between "rotten" and "moldy" is lost on most Americans. And frankly, although I understand the distinction
I'm not an American, but neither am I familiar with a meaning of the word "rotten" referring to food perishability (as opposed to the application to food of the same sense which can be applied to a night out) which doesn't include mouldiness.
I'm from .us. I think it depends on where you grew up and what foods you're used to - I never ate any organ meats as a kid, so I'm not interested in trying them.
My wife's family used to live on a farm, and they're used to eating e.g. chicken gizzards. She won't touch kidney, though, because of the taste, and tongue grosses her out because of the taste buds.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They probably mean the wintergreen in root beer reminds them of toothpaste? It always reminds me of toothpaste. Not enough to stop drinking it, though.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
/me wishes she was making this up.
/me started a farm this year, and is raising grass fed beef in addition to pastured poultry and rabbits. Don't ask about the Tilapia in the garage.