Salmon and Souvlaki

This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

I grew up in Alaska.  Salmon is free for the catching for residents of Alaska.  There are seven people in my family.  As you might guess, we ate salmon all the time.  My parents caught and canned their own salmon every summer.  Mom has sixty million recipes for canned salmon.  We ate salmon so much that I remember begging to get to have canned tuna.  Very rarely, we got to have halibut if Dad went deep-sea fishing but basically, as a child, salmon was the only fish I really knew.

There are all kinds of other fish to catch in Alaska but I don’t remember eating much of that.  I just remember, salmon, salmon, salmon.  Specifically, from 8th grade on, I grew up eating Copper River red salmon, which is the cream of the crop of the salmon catch (debatable among salmon lovers I know but we think it’s the best!)  Let’s just say I have a finely tuned palate for salmon.  There’s really nothing better than Copper River red caught and grilled within the hour.

Not many people have that luxury though and I don’t any more either for that matter.  Now we make do with sometimes bringing home a little bit of salmon from my family, sometimes buying salmon (always wild-caught Alaskan) if it’s on sale at the grocery store, and usually buying canned wild Alaskan pink salmon from Trader Joe’s (the kind with the skin and bones in the can too).  (Shhh, don’t tell my family that I eat pink salmon now – they’ll be horrified.)  Actually, when canned, the pink salmon is pretty good and a much more affordable option for eating fish.

Don’t even get me started about how terrible farm-raised salmon is for the environment, how much worse the texture and taste is, and how much less nutritious it is for you. In a word – don’t buy it, don’t eat it.  I’d rather never eat salmon again than eat farm-raised salmon.

As for other seafood, we try to choose fish that is either responsibly wild-caught or responsibly farm-raised. (Wild-caught or farm-raised really does depend on the kind of fish – see my links below for helping figure that out).

We eat shrimp very rarely and when we do, we buy wild-caught, US raised shrimp (usually from the Gulf).  Remarkably, when in season, this shrimp is just about the same price as other shrimp we see at the store.  We consider shrimp a big treat; we rarely splurge on it and enjoy it very much when we do!

And of course, living in Maryland, there are crabs.  We hardly ever buy crabs but if we do, we make sure to buy Chesapeake Bay-caught blue crabs.  (And shhh, don’t tell anyone but I really don’t like crabs.  At least, I don’t like picking crabs.  I don’t love Old Bay either and so the combination of all that Old Bay and all that work for not much crab means that I don’t crave a crab feast.  Fine, call me an Alaskan and not a Marylander.  I do like a good crab cake though!)

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What about sushi?  We love sushi and we make it ourselves several times a year.  A few years ago, Nik and his friends taught themselves how to do it and it’s really fun.  We have stopped eating raw fish for sushi though because it’s impossible to get sustainably caught or raised raw sushi fish.  The two main types of raw fish used in sushi are salmon and tuna.  The raw salmon used for sushi is farmed.  The raw tuna used for sushi is being overfished and is almost always caught in nets that are terrible for the ocean and all the other kinds of fish and animals who live in it.

We couldn’t in good conscience continue to eat sushi knowing that the raw fish we were eating was so terrible for us and the environment.  Now, we make sushi using smoked Alaskan salmon, shrimp, and crab.  It’s still really delicious but it’s not the same as the raw stuff; I think Nik misses the raw sushi far more than I do.  Now, though, we know where the fish and seafood in our sushi comes from and can eat it without feeling guilty.

Yes, it is possible to get US pole-caught tuna but we haven’t found buy raw sushi-grade tune like that around here.  If we could find that, we’d probably add raw tuna back into our sushi menu.

If you ever want to learn how to make your own sushi, let me know!  We’d be happy to teach you how – it’s really quite easy and very fun!

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About other proteins, well, right now I can’t think of any other main sources of protein that we eat (other than nuts which I’ll talk about in another post).  I did want to address what we don’t eat though:  soy.  Soy is a very common source of protein for anyone who doesn’t eat meat (and for most meat eaters also).  We avoid soy as much as we can.  We do use soy sauce and eat mayonnaise that has soybean oil in it but other than that, we don’t really have any soy in our house.   I know that this is a really contentious subject and there is a lot of conflicting information out there about the pros and cons of eating soy.  Clearly, this is an area where you have to read and decide for yourself what to believe and what to do.  For us, here’s a short summary of why we avoid soy:

• It’s practically impossible to get soy products that are not made with genetically modified soy (and we try to avoid GMOs).
• Soy is quite indigestible and high in anti-nutrients unless it has been prepared traditionally (as in truly fermented tofu, not the commercially-produced tofu that is widely available)
• Soy is also high in phytoestrogens, which interferes with the human body’s endocrine system.

If you eat processed food of any kind, soy is really hard to avoid.  It’s in almost every thing in one form or another.  It’s another good reason to follow the food rules.

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A great book for understanding the world of fish:  Four Fish: The Future of The Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg

A great pocket guide for what fish to buy (you can choose the one for your part of the country), from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  This guide will help you decipher when it’s best to buy wild-caught fish vs. buying farm-raised fish, and when it’s best to avoid a particular species altogether.  It doesn’t tell you why each fish is rated the way it is.  For that, you’ll need to do more research.  It does, however, help you when eating at a restaurant or shopping for raw fish to make better choices.

An extensive summary of research on soy and why we avoid it.

We like to buy our crabs and other seafood from Conrad’s Crabs and Seafood Market.