I fish on occasion, though at my skill level it's probably better described as "being disappointed next to water". I'm usually going for perch or bluegill. People typically throw them in a cooler of ice while still alive, or put them on a stringer, a line run through their mouth and out the gill so that can sort of still somewhat swim around and live until the fisherman is ready to go home.
Both of those seem pretty unpleasant to me. I tried putting them in a cooler on ice the first time and they flopped around for hours. They were still moving when I went to clean them later. If you watch videos of people cleaning fish, you'll see they are often still moving even while the fish is being filleted. When I was a kid, I once saw someone cut the fillets off a fish and toss the "carcass" back in the water where it proceeded to try to swim away.
The last time I went fishing, I tried the first step of ike jime where you spike the brain. I used a little pocket knife and poked it between the eyes. It took a few tries to find the right spot, but once I did, I do think it was more humane. The gills flare and the fish stiffens for a second and then immediately after it has clearly shuffled off its mortal coil.
I don't know if it improves the taste, but it seems kinder to me than letting it beat itself senseless in a pile of ice or flail around in the water with a line running through its throat.
For anyone who thinks this comment is brutal or unpleasant, I would really recommend spending some time fishing or hunting if you eat meat. It's important to have a real tactile understanding of what it means to take an animal from the wild and turn it into food. It's up to you to decide if you think that people should or shouldn't do it, but, either way, I think it is a real learning experience to understand what that choice entails.
Also, I think we tend to live lives increasingly removed from the physical, tactile, natural world. Fishing is a good way to reconnect with nature and with your own nature as an animal, a predator that eats other animals.
Reading this is making me want to go meatless, so thank you for not softening any details.
I don't think I could handle directly killing an animal and preparing the meat unless I was in survival mode. Going to the local grocery store and picking up some neatly wrapped cuts of meat truly removes me from the suffering aspect of animals, let alone the atrocities taking place behind closed doors in mass production slaughterhouses.
How does everyone deal with the cognitive dissonance of how your meat is prepared?
Not to detract from your overall point, which I agree with, but I'd like to clarify "it's still moving" =/= alive. I grew up in a coastal town in Australia so fished a heck of a lot, you can completely sever the head and the body can still "swim" or move around for quite a while - especially in salt water.
This seems to be why the 3rd step is necessary in Ike Jime even after crushing the fish's brain.
As a side note too, my personal opinion would be that thinking of fish as feeling pain in the same way we do, is anthropomorphizing them too much. I've seen fish missing half their body see some food float past and still try to swim after it and eat it. They clearly don't have the same capacity to process incoming signals as we do, nor does that processing result in anything close to the same cognitive stress. A man cut in half wouldn't worry about food no matter how hungry he might be.
To take the absurd extreme example, I wonder how much "suffering" I'm inflicting on the worms or insects that I put on the hooks.
There are a lot of people that get really upset when they get reminded that the meat they are eating used to be a living, breathing animal.
I used to be a hunter (I'm now a vegetarian, but I gave up hunting for other reasons long before becoming vego), and a lot of people got really upset about me killing "innocent deer", like somehow a deer is more deserving of life than cattle in a field.
I remember a while ago there was a picture of a 13 year old girl eating the raw heart of the first deer she killed. There was a horde of people who were incredibly upset, people were calling it cruel, calling the girl's father abusive, etc. etc. At the end of the day though, it's a dead animal, no different from the beef you get all nicely plastic wrapped at the supermarket.
It's the same thing with people getting upset about different cultures eating dogs or horses. At the end of the day, they're all animals. There's no fundamental difference between a pig and a dog.
Just #FishPedantry, a quick kill is an important part of ike jime, and quicker kills are also more humane. But the best-known and probably most important aspect of ike jime is the spinal cord destruction (the bit where they jam a wire down the fish's spine), which supposedly prevents pattern generator neurons in the spinal column from generating the autonomous swim reflex, which reflex depletes ATP in the killed fish and also makes postmortem rigor harsher.
So I think Dave Arnold actually did a triangle test on this stuff with three kinds of fish, and for two of them, the spinal cord destruction had a marked impact.
Somehow, I just assumed that it was completely standard to quickly crush the brain with pliers. If not doing that, maybe you'd chop off the head. This keeps the fish from lashing about with sharp spines that might get you with poison or pierce a raft.
When I was a kid my dad cut the head off a fish (first thing he did) when he was cleaning it. It was on the ground and the mouth still moved and the eyes looked around. He said it was "reflexes" of which I translate to non-conscience movements as an adult.
I really don't think any of the examples your provide were really any different.
I buy live dungeness crabs from Asian markets. They are hard to kill. They fight back. Eventually, I figure out ways to kill them faster. Longer suffering is more traumatic. When I was a kid, I saw my dad killed chickens. He was skilled enough to save blood to make blood cubes in soup. But not everyone (men and women) can do this.
I've only fished once, in a commercially stocked trout lake. The instructions we were given said to net the fish and bring it in, then bash its head against a rock to kill it quickly. I'd always assumed that was standard procedure - strange to find otherwise.
When I was on a fishing trip, the guide would strike the heads of the fish to kill them before putting them in the cooler. It seems brutal but is much more humane then letting them suffocate while on ice.
> The runner up, USA, has 15 restaurants with twice the population.
I believe I read that Michelin doesn't really evaluate most of the USA as part of its starring guide. For example, this [1] indicates that LA is not in the coverage area for the Michelin star system. Smaller cities like Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, etc. are therefore invisible despite having tons of people in aggregate. (Apparently the size of geographic regions and cost are factors.)
Would be interesting to see the US ratio compared with population in the cities actually covered here.
One my gripes with "michelin star" system is that it is heavily tilted towards European and Japanese food. There is absolutely no Indian, South American, Mediterranean, Thai, or Chinese restaurants (albeit few though) in it's catalog. They are pretty much missing the diverse and exceptional gastronomical experience in doing so.
EDIT: Small change, looks like there are few Chinese restaurants!
One of the things that surprised me the most about Tokyo was the variety of “pretty good” cheap food. The “fast casual” equivalent was far better quality than whatever it would be in the US.
I'm a fan of the food and dining experience in Japan but I disagree with this blanket statement. Okonomiyaki is pretty awful. Ramen is rubbish (cheap, non-nutritional noodles remain cheap, non-nutritional noodles however you dress them up). Japanese curry is pretty repulsive stuff and an insult to the sub-continent tradition. I could go on.
It's important to note that this method of slaughter is also considered more humane, and for the same reason why the fish tastes better when prepared this way. Because the fish's body is not flooded with stress chemicals like it is when the brain is not destroyed first and its blood remains inside.
In other words the usual fish slaughter method leaves the fish alive as it slowly suffocates to death and then is killed. This results in muscles filled with lactic acid and other bad things.
>body is not flooded with stress chemicals like it is when the brain is not destroyed first and its blood remains inside.
I've heard both sides of this but have never actually seen any evidence. Some cultures, portions of China for example, believe the opposite - the more stressful death leads to more delicious meat.
I'm for the least stressful death for ethical reasons, but I'd be curious if there's any resources you've found that demonstrate for example your lactic acid point?
> After all, key to good sushi and sashimi is in ageing the fish, allowing the enzymes to break down and moisture to evaporate, resulting in a concentrated flavour.
Can someone elaborate / explain? I always thought that the main quality in sushi and sashimi fish is its freshness. The fresher the better, to the point where shops might even keep the fish alive in aquariums.
Interesting experiments referenced. I think I my personal assumption was that fish could maybe feel pain, and insects probably couldn't. But now one of those is answered.
I remember catching mackerel on a line while on a sailing trip once. None of us really knew how to do fishing, so we beat them to death with a bilge pump handle. It took ages. I don't think that was ike jime.
When hearing about cooking things the one or the other way, I always wonder if the difference in taste is significant. If you'd do a double-blind study, would you see (taste?) a significant difference?
I can't help but feel bad about it, like we really shouldn't be killing anything to eat or to any purpose at all. Yes i'm much more sensibilized than most but we all should be.
I'm all for making it quick, but the article doesn't inspire confidence that this process is quick. By the time this procedure is carried out, the fish has been hooked, drawn up and out of the water, dropped on the ground, and wrestled into position. That must take at least 2 minutes.
If adrenaline and other transmitters were going to be released, that process should do it, regardless of what happens afterward.
I have no problem with the concept of killing an animal to eat it. However this method doesn't appear to be humane. Just cut the damn fish head and be done with it already.
The very first step in this is destroy the brain that's wat faster than just cutting off the head and letting it slowly die of hypoxia. After the pithing everything is just dealing with autonomic systems to prevent muscles from working and building up lactic acid. After the first step there's nothing there to feel pain.
A brain spike is seen as more humane than decapitation for larger animals like cattle, I imagine the same applies for fish.
And given that this method provably results in less trauma byproducts than traditional methods, there is strong evidence that this is a more humane method.
It’s a fancier pithing process and step one is “scramble the brain”. I don’t see how it’s worse, and it’s probably better.
draining the blood off rapidly and shorting out the spinal column really does improve matters, too.
It’s not all that different in intent from kosher and halal slaughter: minimize pain and suffering, respect the animal, get tastier food while you’re at it.
[+] [-] munificent|7 years ago|reply
Both of those seem pretty unpleasant to me. I tried putting them in a cooler on ice the first time and they flopped around for hours. They were still moving when I went to clean them later. If you watch videos of people cleaning fish, you'll see they are often still moving even while the fish is being filleted. When I was a kid, I once saw someone cut the fillets off a fish and toss the "carcass" back in the water where it proceeded to try to swim away.
The last time I went fishing, I tried the first step of ike jime where you spike the brain. I used a little pocket knife and poked it between the eyes. It took a few tries to find the right spot, but once I did, I do think it was more humane. The gills flare and the fish stiffens for a second and then immediately after it has clearly shuffled off its mortal coil.
I don't know if it improves the taste, but it seems kinder to me than letting it beat itself senseless in a pile of ice or flail around in the water with a line running through its throat.
For anyone who thinks this comment is brutal or unpleasant, I would really recommend spending some time fishing or hunting if you eat meat. It's important to have a real tactile understanding of what it means to take an animal from the wild and turn it into food. It's up to you to decide if you think that people should or shouldn't do it, but, either way, I think it is a real learning experience to understand what that choice entails.
Also, I think we tend to live lives increasingly removed from the physical, tactile, natural world. Fishing is a good way to reconnect with nature and with your own nature as an animal, a predator that eats other animals.
[+] [-] sizzle|7 years ago|reply
I don't think I could handle directly killing an animal and preparing the meat unless I was in survival mode. Going to the local grocery store and picking up some neatly wrapped cuts of meat truly removes me from the suffering aspect of animals, let alone the atrocities taking place behind closed doors in mass production slaughterhouses.
How does everyone deal with the cognitive dissonance of how your meat is prepared?
[+] [-] s0ulphire|7 years ago|reply
This seems to be why the 3rd step is necessary in Ike Jime even after crushing the fish's brain.
As a side note too, my personal opinion would be that thinking of fish as feeling pain in the same way we do, is anthropomorphizing them too much. I've seen fish missing half their body see some food float past and still try to swim after it and eat it. They clearly don't have the same capacity to process incoming signals as we do, nor does that processing result in anything close to the same cognitive stress. A man cut in half wouldn't worry about food no matter how hungry he might be.
To take the absurd extreme example, I wonder how much "suffering" I'm inflicting on the worms or insects that I put on the hooks.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
I used to be a hunter (I'm now a vegetarian, but I gave up hunting for other reasons long before becoming vego), and a lot of people got really upset about me killing "innocent deer", like somehow a deer is more deserving of life than cattle in a field.
I remember a while ago there was a picture of a 13 year old girl eating the raw heart of the first deer she killed. There was a horde of people who were incredibly upset, people were calling it cruel, calling the girl's father abusive, etc. etc. At the end of the day though, it's a dead animal, no different from the beef you get all nicely plastic wrapped at the supermarket.
It's the same thing with people getting upset about different cultures eating dogs or horses. At the end of the day, they're all animals. There's no fundamental difference between a pig and a dog.
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
So I think Dave Arnold actually did a triangle test on this stuff with three kinds of fish, and for two of them, the spinal cord destruction had a marked impact.
[+] [-] tropo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|7 years ago|reply
I really don't think any of the examples your provide were really any different.
[+] [-] _7fvc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hidroto|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/05/25/a-disturbing-dinne...
[+] [-] camtarn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jschwartzi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batbomb|7 years ago|reply
http://www.cookingissues.com/category/ike-jime/
[+] [-] Casseres|7 years ago|reply
http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=6031.html
[+] [-] wool_gather|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_3-star_restau...
It has a stunning 25 restaurants. For a population of 126 million. The runner up, USA, has 15 restaurants with twice the population.
As a frequent traveler Japan, I can say from personal experience, it is hard to find a bad meal in Japan.
[+] [-] runako|7 years ago|reply
I believe I read that Michelin doesn't really evaluate most of the USA as part of its starring guide. For example, this [1] indicates that LA is not in the coverage area for the Michelin star system. Smaller cities like Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, etc. are therefore invisible despite having tons of people in aggregate. (Apparently the size of geographic regions and cost are factors.)
Would be interesting to see the US ratio compared with population in the cities actually covered here.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2016/06/01/did-t...
[+] [-] dm8|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Small change, looks like there are few Chinese restaurants!
[+] [-] keiferski|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] factsaresacred|7 years ago|reply
You'll notice too that Japan (along with other Asian locations) received their first Michelin star in only 2008.
European restaurants have stars dating from the 1960s, so this is really just the beginning for the East.
When they finally get around to surveying Bangkok I've little doubt we'll see our first street-food Michelin star.
[+] [-] oska|7 years ago|reply
I'm a fan of the food and dining experience in Japan but I disagree with this blanket statement. Okonomiyaki is pretty awful. Ramen is rubbish (cheap, non-nutritional noodles remain cheap, non-nutritional noodles however you dress them up). Japanese curry is pretty repulsive stuff and an insult to the sub-continent tradition. I could go on.
[+] [-] nihonde|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rthomas6|7 years ago|reply
In other words the usual fish slaughter method leaves the fish alive as it slowly suffocates to death and then is killed. This results in muscles filled with lactic acid and other bad things.
[+] [-] komali2|7 years ago|reply
I've heard both sides of this but have never actually seen any evidence. Some cultures, portions of China for example, believe the opposite - the more stressful death leads to more delicious meat.
I'm for the least stressful death for ethical reasons, but I'd be curious if there's any resources you've found that demonstrate for example your lactic acid point?
[+] [-] truculent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amsvie|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WLSdKunI2Y
[+] [-] kinow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|7 years ago|reply
Can someone elaborate / explain? I always thought that the main quality in sushi and sashimi fish is its freshness. The fresher the better, to the point where shops might even keep the fish alive in aquariums.
[+] [-] theabsurdman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfoy_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|7 years ago|reply
Yes, of course they feel pain.
[+] [-] twic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Odenwaelder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tornhoof|7 years ago|reply
The third book is about cutting fish and includes ike jima steps for different kinds of fish
[+] [-] rafaelvasco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apo|7 years ago|reply
If adrenaline and other transmitters were going to be released, that process should do it, regardless of what happens afterward.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pontifier|7 years ago|reply
Reading the history it makes sense: To sell more tires give people a good reason to travel.
Are there other examples of this sort of unexpected symbiosis?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theabsurdman|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justicezyx|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mfoy_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmnicolas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
And given that this method provably results in less trauma byproducts than traditional methods, there is strong evidence that this is a more humane method.
[+] [-] gotocake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tor3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
draining the blood off rapidly and shorting out the spinal column really does improve matters, too.
It’s not all that different in intent from kosher and halal slaughter: minimize pain and suffering, respect the animal, get tastier food while you’re at it.