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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1448 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Serious Eats has a good rundown. My sense is that, practically, most of the fish that you're going to be able to buy through 'normie' channels has been "super frozen", regardless of how it's presented in the supermarket. When I've tried looking into how the major commercial operations work, it seems that most of them don't even bring their catch in for processing on land. They have processing facilities built into the ship (or some have multiple 'catching ships' that just operate near one big 'processing ship' that they can deliver to much faster than going back to a land-based facility), where they cut stuff up/freeze/can/whatever, all while still at sea. Again, there are no guarantees, but my bet is that you're probably surprisingly safer just buying something from the grocery store, banking on it having been previously super-frozen, than you would even if you went and caught a fish yourself and then had to figure out what to do with it. It is surprising and counterintuitive to me that this would be so, but it is what I think is probabilistically true, since the commercial operations are more scared of running afoul of regulation, so they're probably going to just super freeze everything.

Serious Eats has some other recommendations, but I think there's usually a caveat of whether you're dealing with tuna/farmed salmon vs. anything else, and I think you're basically safe if you're doing tuna/farmed salmon. I've heard in the past that you can do surprisingly low-temperature sous vide on salmon, not changing its texture much, and I've done this myself when I've made sushi. The FDA would call this "mild temperature processing", but the literature is pretty sparse; I just checked again, and it's one of those, "This seems to be a thing that people are doing, but we don't really have good studies to know whether it does anything in that temperature range." Oh well; I guess I maybe don't know if I'll do it again the next time. Maybe I'll still do it just so I don't get the side eye from my wife (she seems to be okay with the idea that it's still "cooking" it, similar to how we sous vide other things in ways that are much much more strongly supported by the literature), and I'll hope it doesn't actually slightly increase the risk of what I think is already a very small risk. Again on this point, the Serious Eats article looks at rates of problems in Japan, and basically concludes that the risk is tiny.

I just watched some videos of fish processing on ships again. It's really like any other part of our food production supply chain; if you look at it, it sort of makes you think, "How could this possibly be safe?" ...yet probabilistically, it pretty much is. Maybe someone with more time could try to estimate micromorts or something from eating sushi... but I have no idea how just making it at home with regular supermarket tuna/farmed salmon would compare to eating out at a random sushi restaurant. Literally no idea which would even be a relatively bigger risk.

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