Global Warming and what you can do to against it

Aha, so /that's/ the "safety angle the catfish lobbyists
are trying to pull: Mercury.

Since fish is always high in mercury, but land-based food is not, the FDA
and the USDA could have widely divergent allowable-mercury levels.

If the catfish lobby succeeds in having the USDA regulate the Vietnamese
variety of catfish (and only that kind), the USDA would have to create a
new category for that product. And guess who would "help" the USDA
formulate the regulations? The catfish lobby, that's who! And they'd make
certain the Vietnamese fish was found to contain too much mercury to be
"safe", even though if it contained no more mercury than any other fish,
domestic or foreign.

Thus the US catfish lobby would use US government power to ensure
protection from foreign competitors, even as US consumers pay for that
protection in higher prices. "Rent seeking" triumphs again!

 

no idea how the vietnamese raise catfish, but fwiu, mercury is mostly an
ocean fish problem, particularly predatory ocean fish like tuna.
catfish are mostly freshwater [right?] and one of the few fish capable
of being farmed on a vegetarian diet. both mitigate against mercury.

don't talk to me about the logic or efficiency of farmed predatory fish
like salmon - they need to be fed other fish. and i absolutely fail to
see the point of having to catch three times the poundage of other fish,
simply to "farm" one pound of salmon.

which gets us back to catfish - one of the few logical fish to farm. we
should encourage foreigners to raise it and stop depleting the oceans,
not try to suppress it.

 

I was just passing by and know how the Vietnamese raise Tilapia,
because I saw the US AID project in the Mekong Delta. They made a few
rice paddies into fish farms, and stocked with baby Tilapia. The
obvious question was, "What do they eat, since a rice paddy is
enclosed?" The answer became obvious as one of the villagers climbed
a ladder to one of the small shacks over the paddy, and soon small
brown objects began falling into a whirling swarm of jumping fish.
The AID rep. said, "That's why the GIs call them 'shitfish.'"

 

that seems perfectly efficient to me!

 

Holy sh*t, and I used to order tilapia at Applebees! Not anymore.