The other day I was at the grocery store, and I had tuna on my list. It’s easy, it keeps more or less forever, it fits in cans, I can put it on salads. But then when I was actually standing in front of the canned fish, I was hit by this sudden wave of guilt at using giant, long-lived fish at the top of the food chain for cheap protein. I’ve heard many talks in which people who understand the oceans say we really ought to be eating bait fish. (And I’ve been buying tuna all along, so I don’t know why the guilt chose last Saturday to set in.) I looked at the other cans on the shelf.
Which brings me to today’s lunch:
I haven’t quite been able to figure out the full environmental implications of this choice. Fish are confusing. If you look up “tuna” on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website, there are six different kinds of tuna, and whether or not you should buy them depends on how they’re caught. If you look up sardines, they give you two options, actual sardines and atlantic herring – but it seems that what I have is actually a little Atlantic fish called a “brisling” or “sprat,” which the Monterey Bay Aquarium doesn’t cover. (Read about sprat here.)
But I do understand food webs, and sardines are way lower down than tuna are. It’s like eating grain-eating chickens instead of man-eating tigers – it’s a more efficient use of resources. Fortunately, they taste pretty good. I polled my Facebook friends, and the consensus was that they should be on toast. A former choir director also suggested a large whisky and soda. I haven’t added that particular flourish yet, but I can’t imagine a large whisky and soda would make anything worse.
A moment of culture clash: today I interviewed a researcher in England about his work on poop, only he didn’t call it poop, he called it poo. I hope to quote him on that. We also bonded on the topic of how much you miss lettuce when you can’t get it, although my experience is from the last couple of weeks of a 40-day boat trip, and his is three months of the year on a remote subantarctic island. That’s a long time to go without lettuce. I didn’t think to ask him if they have alcohol on his island.
I’m sorry, it’s taken me much too long to get to this. After my successful oreo inquiry, I knew had to get to the bottom of the question: how do the shipboard Ritz crackers (prepackaged in pairs, for soup-related usage) compare to the civilian Ritz I bought in Unalaska? You may recall, the shipboard oreos are smaller than regular oreos and they taste worse.
I was already pretty sure that the ship’s Ritz crackers tasted worse, and today a side-by-side taste comparison confirmed that they kind of taste like plastic. This isn’t surprising, because they live in plastic, and the ones in the box are wrapped in that nice wax-paper-y sleeve[oops - it's plastic, too. but less flavorful plastic, or something]. So the only question remaining was: are they smaller?
And here is the shocking conclusion. They aren’t smaller. On closer examination, the ship’s Ritz actually turn out to be *bigger*. I know. I was shocked.
Nilla wafers appeared in the snack bins today before lunch, but unfortunately I won’t be able to advance knowledge on that front – I didn’t bring any with me to compare them to. (My roommate suggests sending a shipwide e-mail to see if anyone brought some, but I have limits.)
The other day I took a packet of oreos from the snack bins on the mess deck and, yknow, they seemed really small. Chris and I have declared today No-Science Friday, so between reporting stories about the Coast Guard, I grabbed another packet of oreos and brought them to my room to compare against the cookies from a regular package I bought in Dutch Harbor. Behold:
The oreo on the left is totally smaller. It doesn’t taste as good, either. My roommate Liz speculates whether the lower cookie-to-filling ratio is to blame. (The mini-pack oreo is also totally shorter if you look at it from the side.)
By the way, you should see how the scientists perk up when they hear us talking about No-Science Friday. Then we explain that it’s just for us. Sorr-yyyyy.
Here’s a follow-up to my Munch post:
I visited the Munch Museum on my February 2007 trip to Norway, and just didn’t feel like I could pass up a piece of Scream cake. (Norwegian lesson of the day: skrik = scream; kake = cake. You’re welcome.)
