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Comments: 554 +- Science: Is That Sushi Hazardous To Your Health? on Sunday November 22, @07:18PM
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pdclarry writes "A recent study by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University found that a piece of tuna sushi may not be tuna at all: 'A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,' wrote the authors. 'All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.' The study, published in PLoS ONE examined 68 samples of tuna sushi purchased from 31 restaurants in Manhattan (New York City) and Denver, Colorado. Some of these were from endangered species, others were not as labeled, and some were not tuna at all. Of these last, five samples labeled as 'white tuna' were from a toxic fish, Escolar, which is a gempylid species banned for sale in Italy and Japan due to health concerns. 'It can cause gastrointestinal symptoms ranging from mild and rapid passage of oily yellow or orange droplets, to severe diarrhea with nausea and vomiting. The milder symptoms have been referred to as keriorrhea [i.e. flow of wax in Greek].' Fraud in sushi is not new; Slashdot also reported study on mislabeling in 2008. This new study shows that some sushi can actually make you sick. The study was also covered by Wired."
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Technically... (Score:5, Informative)
If we're just talking about the tuna, then it's Sashimi [wikipedia.org].
Sushi is vinegar rice, topped with other ingredients, such as fish.
</pedantic>
Re:Technically... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Technically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most good Japanese restaraunts have the difference between Sushi and Sashimi on page 1 of their menu, and more Americans than you think know the difference.
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Re:Technically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sushi, and other words, are defined by how people use them. And in the US that means rice and raw fish wrapped in seaweed for 99% of the population. Then english language, unlike C, does not have an ansi standard. It's all fluid.
You flurbing pizzats and your fempy ticrans. Can't even warrup a mekci bommits.
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Re:Technically... (Score:5, Informative)
"The title asks if the sushi is hazardous, but the story is only about the fish"
The story is not even that: is a non-story. Eating a mislabelled piece of raw fish might produce disease. Well, yeah...
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Re:Technically... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point of the story isn't that eating mislabelled raw fish might cause disease but that a lot of raw fish is mislabelled.
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Re:Technically... (Score:5, Interesting)
What about ManBearPig? In the episode he was described as "half man, half bear, and half pig". So he's 1.5 individuals!
And I definitely agree about the slack thinking. There is nothing quite like a disciplined mind that serves you well with efficient and effective action. Minds become that way by not yielding so easily to the temptation to cut corners and exhibit laziness and it starts with the tiny insignificant things first. Think of all the native English speakers who cannot correctly use words like "loose"/"lose" or "they're"/"there"/"their". It shows that they still struggle with basic usage of their native language, the sorts of issues that they should have worked out back in elementary school. It's noteworthy that foreigners who learn English as a second (or third) langauge tend not to make these mistakes.
Having said that, I'll add that It's okay to have a hard time with something. Not everyone is a great writer or a good speaker and we all have something we're not very good at doing. What's not okay is when an excuse is made for it. The original mistake is just a simple error, like spilling the milk or working an equation incorrectly and getting the wrong answer. It doesn't make you a moron and it doesn't make you a bad person. It's the kind of error that anyone could potentially make because they're human.
The excuse, on the other hand, is cowardly in a sense. It attempts to justify or dismiss something that is clearly incorrect, and all of this to avoid the process of saying "ah-hah, I made a mistake there. Now I know what to do differently in the future." I suspect that they think they are showing weakness or acting "inferior" if for even one moment they say "hey, you're correct; you are right and I had that wrong." The obsession over preventing the perception of inferiority at all costs, including the cost of accuracy, is why I call this cowardly. Nowhere in this can you find the security of knowing that you are who and what you are, whether or not anyone else thinks so.
By and large, people who make those grammatical mistakes are full of excuses. It's the reason why they keep making the same mistakes and their writing does not gradually improve with usage over time the same way that other skills would. You would expect a blacksmith to make a higher-quality knife after 20 years of experience than anything he made when he first started out. So why do native English speakers fail to correctly apply rules of grammar that they should have learned and mastered as children?
The blacksmith has a boss who expects a certain level of job performance, and if he is not internally motivated by an appreciation of his craft then this external motivation will spur him to improve his work. The average Slashdotter who reads and posts for leisure has no external motivation. The only reason why he'd try to get things right is because he values excellence. When you value excellence, you don't see yourself as a static person who scrapes by on the path of least resistance. You see yourself as a dynamic, growing individual who gradually learns more and becomes better at everything you do, whether or not anyone is looking, whether or not anyone is impressed, and whether or not you would have been penalized for a lesser effort. It's an internal thing. The reason to become a better speaker and a better writer is simple: you speak and write on a daily basis, so your life (and quite possibly others) is enriched by being able to do these things well. It's also hard to really enjoy doing something when you struggle to achieve even basic competency.
The antithesis of this is a form of laziness with perhaps some elements of apathy. In that case, you're not really convinced that it's worth doing at all because yo
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Re:So technically (Score:5, Insightful)
Butchering words is how languages grow and develop.
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Re:So technically (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:So technically (Score:4, Funny)
How much is a gigabyte then?
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Re:So technically (Score:5, Informative)
In Japan sashimi is always served in sushi restaurants. A person may say, "Let's go eat sushi" and then at the restaurant end up eating only sashimi. But at a banquet sushi is almost never served. Sashimi on the other hand is virtually always served. A person would never say, "I went to a banquet and ate sushi" meaning that they ate sashimi.
Historically, sushi is a snack food. It's kind of an all-in-one meal since the rice is included in every bite. In a way you can think of it as a sandwich. In western culture, bread was once seen as the most important part of a meal. With a sandwich, you eat the bread with the meal. But you can also eat bread separately with the meal. You can eat a roast beef sandwich, but it would be strange eat a piece of roast beef and call it a "sandwich" simply because you bought it in a sandwich shop.
I understand your point about US usage of words being different. But I think you miss a lot of the Japanese food culture by confusing the terms. There is a lot of sushi that doesn't contain sashimi. In Japan, eating in a sushi restaurant is one of the easiest ways to accommodate vegetarians since there is a large variety of vegetarian sushi. On the other hand, sushi is not actually a very important part of Japanese cuisine. Sashimi is *far* more important. I couldn't imagine eating a high class meal without having sashimi. By understanding the importance of the different kinds of food, I think you will gain a better appreciation for what is one of the world's great cuisines.
But, as always, YMMV.
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Re:Technically... (Score:4, Funny)
It's a party in my mouth and everyone's throwing up.
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Re:Technically... (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, Oxford's lexicographic philosophy is more descriptivist than prescriptivist. Their stated intent is to document, record and communicate the language they find through actual usage. Thus, Oxford, while the gold standard of English lexicography (more so British usage than American, but it's pretty strong in either case) is not to be confused with an "ANSI standard." It's an entirely different thing, a better analogy might be the SIbley Guide.
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Re:Technically... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Keriorrhea (Score:4, Insightful)
Magic (Score:5, Funny)
Because that's just what any employer wants to hear, more details about their employees' bowel movements!
I've found there are two magic words, that when said together, sequentially, cause the listener to not care any further why you are going to not make it in to the office today.
Word 1: Explosive
Word 2: Diarrhea
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Yuck! Sushi! (Score:3, Funny)
Eating sushi is almost as disgusting as eating raw fish!
Re:Yuck! Sushi! (Score:5, Funny)
Cavemen discovered that cooking meat was a good idea some millennia ago and we've been doing it since then, but some people never got the memo because they were on an island or something.
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Re:Fire goooooood. (Score:4, Funny)
Your lose.
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Re:Yuck! Sushi! (Score:5, Funny)
So why don't you eat actual Sushi instead of Sashimi, with something like chicken if you don't like raw fish?
The more you know...... the less food you'll hate over pure ignorance.
Somehow raw chicken just doesn't do it for me.
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Re:Yuck! Sushi! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Yuck! Sushi! (Score:5, Insightful)
So why don't you eat actual Sushi instead of Sashimi, with something like chicken if you don't like raw fish?
The more you know...... the less food you'll hate over pure ignorance.
Don't you think the GP knows the difference given that he specifically claims that sushi isn't as disgusting as raw fish, thereby putting them clearly into different categories?
The better your reading comprehension...... the more able you'll be to hear that whoosh sound.
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META comment: PLoS ONE (Score:3, Informative)
PLoS ONE, if you didn't know, is a public-access scientific journal publishing enterprise. No more use/abuse of scientists as creator of content AND reviewers of content (who both do this for free) and then only releasing the articles for profit, for the next 100 years. I am thoroughly disgusted by this business model which takes the work of us scientists, gives nothing back and then profits from it. Fuck that.
PLoS ONE, I wish you luck. Please do crush the Natures, Sciences and Elseviers of this world. Pretty please.
Please, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
PLoS charges scientists to get published. A big part of what caused the economic collapse is that rating agencies started to hand out AAA ratings to securities that didn't deserve them, and they did this because the issuers of these securities were paying the rating agencies. This PLoS ONE's business model is the same thing. PLoS ONE receives more money when it publishes more articles.
Doesn't this just scream CONFLICT OF INTEREST to anyone else?
Please, I'll take Science and Nature any day.
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Possible none issue soon (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:5, Informative)
It would be nice to see DECENT aquaculture come to fruition.
Yikes, aquaculture is hard enough to do with fresh water fish. You want to do it with salt water fish? Good luck...
It's one thing to have a salt water aquarium, at a zoo or for a hobby (read: slavery). But aquaculture involves raising fish at incredibly high densities in order to be profitable. These high densities mean that the slightest little change - in dissolved O2, pH, temperature, nitrites, ammonia, etc will kill your fish. Now you want to add salinity which not only has to be kept within limits but corrodes your pumps, pipes and valves, increasing the chances of breakdowns?
No thanks! Have fun!
PS: Fish die really really quietly, and they love to do it in large quantities. I know whereof I speak, I promise...
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Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:5, Insightful)
As it happens, saltwater aquaculture is widely practiced from Norway to Chile. It basically involves putting a cage out in the sea and growing fish in it.
Of course, there are lots of reasons not to encourage most fish-farming like the fact that it requires huge amounts of wild fish to be caught, mulched and processed to be fed back to the "desirable" fish species that is being farmed. That is, fish farming uses more fish than it creates, thereby exacerbating the chronic overfishing problems that plague the seas.
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Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:5, Insightful)
...then at least stop eating top level carnivores.
Not to worry, I don't eat humans on Atkins.
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Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps we should go for IVM (in-vitro meat)?
I bet that the first commercial use for IVM will be feeding tuna, and other carnivorous livestock. That will fund the technology until it's ready for actually eating. As a bonus, we could clone rare (or maybe even extinct) species, and eat them too!
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Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:5, Insightful)
What needs to happen is that ALL OF THE NATIONS that have fisheries need to protect these. It can not be so half ass anymore.
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Re:Possible none issue soon (Score:4, Informative)
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Buyer Beware! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buyer Beware! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Buyer Beware! (Score:5, Interesting)
I currently live in an inland city, hundreds of kilometers from the the nearest ocean. This is why I refuse to eat sushi at the restaurants here since the fish will not be very fresh.
I remember reading this years ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/08SUSH.html?pagewanted=all [nytimes.com]
Food and Drug Administration regulations stipulate that fish to be eaten raw ? whether as sushi, sashimi, seviche, or tartare ? must be frozen first, to kill parasites. "I would desperately hope that all the sushi we eat is frozen," said George Hoskin, a director of the agency's Office of Seafood. Tuna, a deep-sea fish with exceptionally clean flesh, is the only exception to the rule.
It seems once a year, someone re-discovers the amazing fact that uncooked fish should not be served fresh.
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Re:Buyer Beware! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Buyer Beware! (Score:4, Interesting)
When you make your sandwich, it doesn't matter much if your uncooked meat slices (most luncheon meat is "cooked" by injecting it with salt and spices) are a little thick or wide. You just try to get roughly the right total amount and balance it off with veggies.
When you make sushi, if you don't get juust the right size, the texture is all wrong. Something that should be sublime and delicious becomes a disgusting gag inducer. Even the taste seems different. Inexperienced or American* sushi chefs can easily make that mistake, and home chefs all the moreso. (*"American" cuisine being of the "it's not the highest quality, so lets give them more of it" bent more often than it ought)
And then there's Fugu, which is extra difficult because a little bit of toxin is part of the experience.
I don't know how "sushi chef" compares to "executive chef" in terms of preparation difficulty, but it's definitely way above "sandwich artist" on the scale of difficulty.
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Re:Buyer Beware! (Score:4, Informative)
It's not like this is a new thing, or surprising, though. People have been catching all kinds of nasty things from raw seafood, like Hep A from oysters, for a long time.
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Endangered species? No (Score:4, Informative)
The chances that the fish you eat in sushi is an endangered species in a sushi bar is roughly the same as if you go to any other seafood restaurant. There are a lot of fish in the sea (no shit sherlock) - assume that 0.01% of fish are endangered. Now imagine dragging a net behind your boat. In theory at most 0.01% of all fish in your net will be endangered. Let's look at this more closely: Endangered fish are likely to exist in much smaller quantities, so while there might be 500 tuna per square mile of ocean, there might only be 1 of super-endangered-deliciousfish. Secondly, super-endangered-deliciousfish (SEDF) may only exist in the Bahamas, while the fisherman may be trawling off the coast of Georgia for Tuna, where Tuna are known to be abundant. Your likelyhood of catching a SEDF is highly unlikely.
In any case the fish is dumped in the boat's hold on ice, and then sorted out when they get back to port. Fish are already partially ready for consumption at this point. It's not like fisherman go out in the forest and hunt individual endangered fish with rifles where they can see them. Making most any argument about endangered fish in a commercial fishing situation is completely retarded. The only argument for this is situations where opportunistic overfishing occurs in specific areas like when salmon swim upriver to lay their eggs, and this is already highly regulated.
Also this article came out almost a year ago in the NYT this is old news(!)
Re:Endangered species? No (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly true. Fish schools are specifically targeted by trawlers, found by sonar and fished out. There is not much by-catch in these nets contrary to indiscriminate trawling or using longlines or gill nets. Bluefin Tuna, for example is only found in the Mediterranean and the chance of catching a endangered species that lives in the Arctic is zero. Of course Bluefin is already endangered and there lies the crux of the problem: We generally overexploit all fish stocks and should declare large areas of the oceans at no-fishing zones to recover fish populations and become sustainable in the long run.
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Better take the alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
Back to good old American Hamburgers. At least nobody ever got sick or died eating those, right?
Or in other words: People do stuff with food that might be harmful. There is no reason to take out Sushi in particular.
great timing (Score:5, Funny)
I just sat down at the computer for dinner with my spicy tuna roll and this is the top story on the Front page. Thank you Slashdot, for ruining my appetite yet again.
Skip tuna altogether? (Score:4, Informative)
no more "toxic" than Olestra (Score:4, Informative)
The fish contains indigestible fats; as such, it has about the same effect as eating large amounts of Olestra: it's laxative and leads to oily "leakage".
"The US FDA has warned consumers about potential mislabeling of oilfish [same thing applies to Escolar], but has concluded that any laxative side effects that occur are uncomfortable at worst and pose no health risk."
Re:Oh, so that's what happened. (Score:5, Funny)
"Tubgirl Tuna", they call it.
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Re:Colorado and New York (Score:5, Informative)
If only there were an ocean closer to New York. It would be even better if that ocean had tuna of its own. Best of all would be if the tuna there was one of the most delicious [nationalgeographic.com] varieties around, such that it was the most used tuna [wikipedia.org] for sushi/sashimi. Wow...one can dream.
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Re:Escolar (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Tuna sushi (Score:4, Insightful)
Yuck, can can you possibly compare tuna sashimi with canned tuna? I hate that canned crap but tuna sashimi is heaven. Especially a piece of nicely marbled toro.
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Re:post (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:post (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:post (Score:5, Funny)
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