TracyFood

Monkey Monday: feeling fishy 3 November 2008 2:27 pm

Posted by Tracy in : fish, geekery, local food, news, school , trackback

So I broke open a browser tab to start writing this Monkey Monday post in response to this fascinating Wall Street Journal article about the use of canned mackerel as currency in U.S. prisons. I mean, dudes. There’s a food geek paper to be written there for sure.

Unfortunately, I can’t use it as my final research paper topic for Comparative Cuisines: I’m allowed to write about pretty much anything as long as it’s contemporary and outside the U.S. So today I’m rocking the NYU library once more, letting my geek flag fly, as it were… and I think I’ve stumbled into something really good! I call it…

IJsselmeerpaling revisited

IJsselmeerpaling, for those of you tuning in to TracyFood since summer 2007’s epic bike adventure around the former Zuiderzee, is eel from the IJsselmeer — the lake created in the middle of the Netherlands after the building of the Afsluitdijk, the 30-kilometer dam that quite literally united the country. (You can read our triumphant post about riding the tandem across it here.) So the history of the IJsselmeer is interesting for a lot of reasons: techologically, because of the massive civil engineering involved, politically because of the machinations required to get the Afsluitdijk built, and ecologically and economically, because it created a freshwater lake out of what was once a shallow (saltwater) inland sea that supported an entirely different fishing industry based on herring. (Economies based on fish! It’s today’s theme!) Of course, I would love the chance to tie all this back to food today, and paling (eel) seemed like a good place to start looking around.

So I busted open Google to see what I could find about IJsselmeerpaling, and the very first thing I turned up was an episode of a Dutch TV show, Klootwijk Aan Zee. KAZ is a travel show devoted to fish, and on 16 July 2008, they ran an episode about eel in which it was revealed that a lot of so-called IJsselmeerpaling is actually from Ireland. Scandal! So now I’ve watched the episode in question and read a Dutch eel industry press release about the episode, and their response to critical questions about the (in)humane handling of eels. (The latter is a little confusing, because the questions are apparently from a Dutch animal rights group, addressed to (I think) the Dutch minister of agriculture, land management, and food safety, but the answers appear to be from the eel industry P.R. folks? In any case, there’s definitely something to be written about all this. Yay! Now to assemble at least 10 sources for my bibliography…

mom

This past summer I watched several episodes of Mr. Klootwijk' s popular show including the one about paling (Rerun a week later).
So I decided to bring the real EEL back home with me.
Eel that was caught in the Brasemmer Meer, right around the corner from the smoke house, where I had the eel vacuum packed safe for air travel. It was very yummy!