Wednesday, January 14, 2009

PETA's newest lunacy... Sea Kittens.

Give me a break...

From the PETA website which I will not honor with a link...

"People don't seem to like fish. They're slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads—which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you're swimming, and the big ones—well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat."

So, lets just start calling them something that might bring to mind something cute and cuddly.


Sea Kittens.

PETA thinks that by renaming fish sea kittens, compassionate people who would never dream of hurting a dog or a cat might extend that sympathy to fish, or sea kittens.


Sea Kittens my aching, dying ass.

Have you ever dealt with a wet cat? They aren't cute and cuddly.

Besides the marketing folks have already been hard a work applying new benign names to some pretty scary fish...

For instance-
You might see on the menu something tasty-sounding:

Chilean Sea Bass.
Formerly known as a Patagonian Toothfish.
Srsly, if you saw "Patagonian Toothfish" on the menu, you wouldn't order it, would you? And Dissostichus eleginoides is too damn hard to pronounce.

And I guarantee that if you saw it in the fishmarket, you wouldn't order it...


(Chilean sea bass: Photo by Mike McCune (CC))

And this isn't the first time...
Chefs have a long and storied history of food re-labeling...

Selling skate and stingray as scallops. And 9 times out of 10, when you see grouper on the menu at a restaurant, what your are getting is something only very distantly related to the Gourper/Snapper Complex.
(I like how Hooters Restaurants deal with it... It used to be a Grouper Sandwich.
Now it's the Grouper's Cousin sandwich.)

Another one of my favorites, Monkfish.
A/k/a Lophius piscatorius


Monkfish is tasty tasty!
It is a white-fleshed fish that has the taste and consistency of lobster.

Mmm... Monkfish!!


From Foodtv.ca, recipe here.



But, before it was popular on the menu, Marine Biologists had another name for them...
Anglerfish.


Smile for the camera!

Well, the plan has worked for the restaurant industry, why not for the whole orders of Osteithyes and Chondricthyes.

Sea Kittens.
Well... I guess the only other thing I can mention concerning this on-so-intriguing topic is that, as a rule, Fish (or Sea Kitties) taste like fish.
Kitties (real ones that is) as a whole, taste like chicken.
Trust me on this.

TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm trying to figure out who the Patagonian Toothfish looks like. He has such a familiar face.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure that PETA stands for "Raging Bunch of Liberals who want everyone EXCEPT themselves to value animals more than people".

Perhaps it stands for Please Euthanize The Animals ...
so, which is worse: managing to adopt out such a miserable percentage, or trying to hide it?

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/