Hunting & Consumerism: But is it safe to eat?

This is still the closed season for all but still water fishing in the U.K, so I can't wander down to my local river and try to hoik one out with spinners and suchlike, but even so I found myself thinking about River Perch this morning - particularly the challenge of filleting them. They have the most extraordinary scales, Perch - there's no way to get them off with a scaling tool - and, for the first few I caught, I was quite at a loss about how to deal with them. I tried roasting them with their scales on but that didn't work so well - since the scales tended to pop off during the cooking you ended up with mouthfuls of fish garnished with - seemingly - burnt fingernails: not terribly pleasant!

When I was trying to figure out how to get around this I trawled through YouTube for help. Among them all, this is the one I found most helpful and I thought I'd post it here. It's a tremendously simple and easy way to skin a Perch and produce very tidy fillets. I've tried it myself and it works a treat:



I have a dim memory of reading somewhere that - what with the difficulties of off-shore fishing - there was a good deal of Perch eaten in the UK during WWII. And because of this, after the war, Perch were viewed as a reminder of austerity fare and were shunned. Maybe this is so, maybe not, but whatever the reason, Perch is certainly viewed over here as being an animal which resides outside the class of acceptable foodstuffs: Perch is not to be eaten. Having eaten a few of them myself I can certainly say they are indeed a perfectly pleasant thing to eat and - by quite a large margin - nicer than, for instance, the pale and dull tasting 'Vietnamese River Cobbler' that's on sale in Tesco's these days.

It's odd though - when I told people that I'd been, for months, catching and eating river Perch the most common reaction by far was 'Is it safe? Aren't the rivers polluted?'. The most common reaction after that was "Isn't it illegal? Aren't they a protected species or something?"

It seems to me that this is - at least here in the U.K - a symptom of a growing fear and distrust of food that hasn't been 'authorised' in some way. It's as if we think that, if something hasn't gone through the mill of the giant supermarket chains - if we haven't bought it from Tesco's, in other words, then the food must automatically be contaminated with something dangerous or that consuming it will make us criminals. "Is it safe?" "Isn't it illegal". It's very strange.

All over England you'll see apples rotting on trees in the Autumn. We don't pick them any more; kids don't go scrumping any more: if an apple doesn't come from Tesco's, we seem to think, then it's not a real apple at all.
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Tags: consumerism, cooking, health and safety