A Roman emperor once summoned the Senate to discuss cooking a turbot
English has pork for pig and beef for cow, but no special kitchen word for fish. That gap hides a giant: the average person now eats more than twice as much fish as in 1961, and Asia alone accounts for over two-thirds of the world's appetite for it.
Global consumption of fish as food has grown by about 3.2 percent a year since 1961, roughly double the pace of population growth and faster than every kind of land-animal meat except poultry. Per person, intake rose from 9.0 kilograms in 1961 to 20.2 kilograms in 2015. The centre of gravity has moved east. Europe, Japan and the United States ate 47 percent of the world's food fish in 1961 but only about a fifth in 2015, when Asia consumed some 106 million of the 149 million tonnes eaten worldwide.
More than 32,000 fish species have been described, making fish the most varied group of vertebrates, yet people eat only about a fifth of them. Their flesh is delicate because it is built from short fibres held in thin sheets of connective tissue, about 3 percent of the weight compared with 15 percent in land animals. Fish provide only around 34 calories per person per day globally; their real value lies in easily digested protein, with a 150-gram portion covering roughly half or more of an adult's daily need.
Cooks handle it in every way imaginable: raw as sashimi, cured in citrus as ceviche, pickled like herring, smoked like salmon, or fried as fish and chips. Many old preservation methods are no longer necessary but survive because people like the taste. The dish has long carried prestige. The satirist Juvenal told of the emperor Domitian calling a special sitting of the Senate to decide how a turbot should be cooked.
Fish also carry hazards. Fugu pufferfish hold a lethal toxin in their organs, and in Japan only chefs who pass a national exam may prepare them. Many toxins behind fish poisoning survive ordinary cooking. Honesty is an issue too: when the conservation group Oceana tested over 1,200 US seafood samples between 2010 and 2012, a third were mislabelled, including 87 percent of snapper. One Seattle study found roundworm larvae in every wild salmon examined and none in farmed fish.
Source: Fish as food
