Sometimes it's a little sad when you find what you're looking for.
I went to the fish market this morning at 4:45am. My three cabmates and I practiced how to say, "fish market" in Japanese (only about 1% of taxi drivers speak English), but the employee at the taxi stand laughed and said tourists are only up at that time of the morning if they're going to the fish market. The cab was clean, and the streets were quiet. The fish market is enormous, taking about 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other. Most of the market is a mix of shack-looking stands undercover like a warehouse, but without sides. The tuna auction is the big draw, and I probably heard 15 different languages while crammed in the visitor area watching the men (it was all men working in the market) examine the frozen tuna.In general, I seemed to be the only one who was a little nausous from the blood; others were taking video of the intricate knife slicings involved in the killing. (Kiba, budding sushi chef, I think from the freshness of the fish and the style of the slicing techniques that this might be your type of place.) I couldn't take the box of giant (2+inch) eyes that had been dismembered from fish.
I didn't know that they import seafood from around the world, including MD blue crabs. It makes the whole endeavor seem less sustainable. The fish isn't necessarily fresh, fossil fuels aplenty are used, and don't even get me started on the walls of styrofoam boxes. It certainly felt like an authentic experience (in a way that Pike Place market doesn't to me), even though I just might not have seen how it's regulated behind the scenes.
5 comments:
You can include me squarely in group 2. This is why I don't visit chicken processing plants either. Too much information can really put a damper on your eating habits.
I'm with both of you. I like my food when it doesn't remind me of who it was.
When we visited my cousins in Colorado this summer (hi Todd, Amber, H, and Elle) we discovered they live near a Butterball (it might have been Tyson's) pocessing plant. We tried to figure out if they had tours, but the building didn't look very inviting, and there was no obvious guest entrance. I imagine they operate on the assumption that most people would prefer not to see precisely where their food comes from.
The building where I have worked for the past three years has a huge turkey farm as our next door neighbor. As I arrived at work this morning I was overwhelmed by the smell of turkey droppings, and as I left work I heard a familiar "gobble, gobble, gobble". I then drove by hundreds of free range turkeys. People in my office have raved about their delicious Thanksgiving dinners, with the main dish being a turkey from our neighbors. I can't even think about buying and cooking a turkey that I've "met", and I can barely eat one that I've only seen in a freezer case. Jeanine, I'm with you - we're better off not knowing. And, we're even better off if we haven't seen our food at play.
Your video looks like one I saw on 60 Minutes! What fun! Thanks for sharing your morning.
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