Customer Reviews

Seafood Lover's Almanac

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Seafood Lover's Almanac has great illustrations and is loaded with fish facts and a punch.  The book educateme about how fish are caught, how they are faring, their nutritional values, the drugs, antibiotics, etc. that are often used in farming and hatchery-raised fisheries, what species are endangered, how we can help, and how to shop and cook them.  I learned that Sockeye Salmon is one of the many varieties of Pacific northwest salmons, that Tilapia is farm-raised, and that Orange roughy is found off New Zealand, Australia and Namibia and is always sold frozen, and Bocaccio is an ocean rock fish from the California coast.  The authors make it clear which species are endangered like Patagonian toothfish (which is in the markets as Chilean sea bass), and which are doing well, like Alaska wild salmon. Included is a fish scale that ranks species from green to yellow to red, which made it easy for me to check how a particular species is doing and what makes ecological sense.

There are recipes from some renowned chefs that appear throughout the text - not many - but enough to send the home cook to their local fish monger.  Christopher Idone Cookbook Author

Carl Safina has long been an advocate of fish preservation, and an eloquent one at that. There is scandalously little information about fish for consumers; many do not know which fish are members of perilously depleted stocks. Safina et al manage to impart information about the state of fisheries without making a fish-eater feel bad about him or herself. We need more books that can educate, not condescend, and not reprimand about the effects of human consumption, existence, and behavior. These authors take a smart route: teaching readers to become more informed and concerned about fish just by learning about them.

"One size does not fit all" in the areas where food choice and environmental responsibility collide, though this book nonetheless offers an overview of the choices we can make as individuals that are important and can make a significant difference. This book was a gentle, persuasive, thorough and (to me) entertaining overview of a subject that had concerned me for a while. The book (and a downloadable "pocket guide" available on the book's website) is useful for both shopping and eating out, and I have learned alot about tastes and preferences I didn't know I had! This is a good one.

Seafood Lover's Almanac has great illustrations and is loaded with fish facts and a punch.  The book educateme about how fish are caught, how they are faring, their nutritional values, the drugs, antibiotics, etc. that are often used in farming and hatchery-raised fisheries, what species are endangered, how we can help, and how to shop and cook them.  I learned that Sockeye Salmon is one of the many varieties of Pacific northwest salmons, that Tilapia is farm-raised, and that Orange roughy is found off New Zealand, Australia and Namibia and is always sold frozen, and Bocaccio is an ocean rock fish from the California coast.  The authors make it clear which species are endangered like Patagonian toothfish (which is in the markets as Chilean sea bass), and which are doing well, like Alaska wild salmon. Included is a fish scale that ranks species from green to yellow to red, which made it easy for me to check how a particular species is doing and what makes ecological sense.

There are recipes from some renowned chefs that appear throughout the text - not many - but enough to send the home cook to their local fish monger.  Christopher Idone Cookbook Author

Useful propaganda; but in reality to come to such definitive conclusions you need to have an army of PhD biologists doing huge statistical sample tests.

But don't let that deter you from the nice graphics and the fact that fish sustainability is a serious topic.