What in the hell is tilapia, and when did it become a food?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Pretty decent freshwater whitefish, became food once we depleted many other whitefish stocks to the point of extinction or near-extinction.
Was one of the few foods my hyper-taste-sensitive Asperger’s daughter would eat for a while … until she became vegetarian and now eats only pasta.
And here I thought it was the second-largest city in Latvia. Or something.
No, you’re thinking of the Lats. It’s the land where their cousins the Tils live, and who survive mainly on cash crops.
Lol this can’t be a serious question. Anyway I just had some tonight for dinner. Very affordable, fairly good for people who don’t like fishy fish.
about 7 years ago. began hearing about it everywhere about that time.
I hear from my mom down in Alabama that some restaurants (or servers at least) hype it as “Jesus fish”–supposedly the fish of loaves-and-fishes fame.
It’s pretty cheap. We (or rather I, wife hates all fish) eat it 1-2 nights a week. They come cheap and big and as they’re farmed we can eat them a little bit more re: the mercury.
I would say grill them, with a crank of salt and pepper then add some fresh basil leaves and enjoy with whatever meal you want. Alternately sauce instance of salt and pepper.
Some people in warm places grow their own tilapia in swimming pools.
.
It’s a manure eating fish used in Sea Bass farms to clean the water from the Sea Bass tanks. How it became a stable for human consumption is beyond me. I won’t eat the stuff.
You’re saying you won’t eat a fish that eats other fish’s poo?
Elitist…
Wait until you stumble across some barramundi, Boo…
Mark Bittman, May 2011
I prefer farmed fish. Looking to the future, we will have either farmed fish or none at all. Consider the buffalo. Today, we have farmed buffalo. 100 years ago, we had wild buffalo, and we killed 99.9% of them off. Today, we are going that way with fish. Specific species, cod, tuna, etc, are on the way to the extinct point. We believe there are plenty because of crappy census methods. Better to farm than eat wild fish.
I agree with you and most of the fish I eat is farmed–salmon, catfish, basa, trout. It’s not because it’s farmed per se that I don’t eat tilapia but because it’s farmed badly and just not very healthful or gastronomically interesting.
Honestly I can’t afford anything else in terms of fish.
it’s a fish. restaurants have served it for years. at least 20 years.
In the 1980’s we had graduate students studying their ecology. Now we eat them. In his book on the status of ecosystems, Stuart Pimm says you can look at cookbooks from past decades to see what fish used to be abundant.Used to see cod, mackerel, flounder and rockfish on ice. Now its monkfish and tilapia. Just another step as we progress down the food chain in search of money (1) and food (2).
Tilapia is in the carp family and yes, it’s a bottom feeder. As mentioned above, it’s farmed in conjunction with sea bass.
I won’t eat it either.
It’s a fish that can be farmed in large freshwater ponds and hatched in wire-frame plastic sheeting above-ground swimming pools. Thirty years ago an entrepreneurial Baptist preacher of my acquaintance thirty years ago had four pools for hatching Tilapia in his back yard. As best I could tell it was an alternative for him to raising chinchillas for sale. His investment narrative was a depletion of fish stocks one (it was during the Carter administration time period). He thought it was a great investment. I guess he died before it ever took off (he was 10-20 years older than my parents.)
As perch, flounder, whitefish stocks decline, farmed fish are the only alternative. And you’ve seen how small the wild-caught white fish have become in stores.
Here’s the story.
Drilling for natural gas in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, they didn’t hit a gas pocket but they did hit warm water, which flowed to the surface as an artesian well. Tilapia had been prohibited in many states because it was feared that they would take over local waters if they escaped. No problem here, where winter temps in the Valley can reach -30 F. So one of the first big commercial tilapia operations got going. Cutting out tilapia fillets left an ever increasing pile of fish heads and guts. So….. Get some gators to eat the fish remains!
Thus, Colorado Gators was born.
Having lived in Florida and going back for visits, it is very entertaining to engage Floridians and mention ‘We have tough gators out in Colorado. They live outside in -30 degree winter temperatures, not far from Alamosa, one of the cold spots in the lower 48.’
LOL — they have an albino gator called Mr. Bo Mangles.
Fun fact from that website: