Fish (food)

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This page is about the use of fish as food; for other uses of the word, see Fish (disambiguation)

Fish served with vegetables and herbs.

Fish as a food describes the edible parts of water-dwelling, cold-blooded vertebrates with gills. Other edible water-dwelling animals such as mollusks, crustaceans, and shellfish are classified as seafood, rather than as fish.

Fish is consumed as food all over the world; with other seafoods, it provides the world's prime source of high-quality protein: 14-16% of the animal protein consumed world-wide; over 1 billion people rely on fish as their primary source of animal protein.^[1]

Fish is highly perishable, so fresh fish is only found near bodies of water, or where efficient refrigerated transportation is available. But fish is widely preserved through drying, salting, freezing, and canning.

1 Common food fish
2 Fish consumption
3 Preserving fish for market
4 Preparation for consumption
5 Nutrition and health
6 Fish as meat
7 Footnotes
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Common food fish

There are over 27,000 species of fish, making them the most diverse group of vertebrates. However, only a small number of the total species are commonly eaten.

Some commonly harvested and eaten fish species include:

Also see: List of edible fish.

[edit] Fish consumption

Bangladeshis and Indian people from the states of West Bengal, Orissa, Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala usually like to keep fish in their daily menu of foods. In India and Bangladesh fresh water fishes like Rohu and saltwater fishes like Hilsa are quite popular. Iceland, Japan and Portugal are the largest fish consumers per capita in the world. [3]

[edit] Preserving fish for market

Fish at an Asian supermarket.

Fish is highly perishable once dead. It is sometimes transported live in tanks, but this is expensive. It can be refrigerated for a short time or preserved.

Fish is preserved in a variety of ways. The oldest and still most common way world-wide is drying or salting.

Some fish, such as salmon, tuna and herring are cooked and canned, while desiccation (complete drying) is commonly used to preserve some food fish, such as cod and partial drying and salting is popular for the preservation of herring and mackerel, among other fish.

In the industrialized countries, freezing is the most common preservation technique.

[edit] Preparation for consumption

Fish can be prepared in a variety of ways, including not cooking (raw) (cf. sashimi), marinating (cf. escabeche), baking, frying, grilling, and poaching in court-bouillon.

[edit] Nutrition and health

Fish, especially saltwater fish, is high in Omega 3 fatty acids, which are heart-friendly, and a regular diet of fish is highly recommended. This is supposed to be one of the major causes of reduced risk for cardiovascular diseases in Eskimos. It has been suggested that the longer lifespan of Japanese and Nordic populations may be partially due to their higher consumption of fish and seafood. The Mediterranean diet is likewise based on a rich intake of fish.

[edit] Fish as meat

Though fish is the flesh of an animal, it is often not considered to be meat for the purposes of food taboos.

Various Christian fasts involve abstaining from meat. In Catholicism before Vatican II, meat was forbidden during Lent and on Fridays, but fish was permitted. In Eastern Orthodoxy, fish is permitted on some fast days when meat is forbidden, but stricter fast days exclude fish as well, though permitting invertebrate animals such as shrimp and oysters, which are considered "fish without blood".

Muslim halaal practice and Jewish kosher practice treat fish differently from other forms of animal flesh.

Some Buddhists and Hindus (Brahmins of West Bengal state in India) abjure meat, but not fish. Many vegetarians in Western countries, including all vegans, regard fish as a form of "meat," and do not consume it.

[edit] Footnotes

^ FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2000, Rome, Italy, 2000, paraphrased in [1] and [2]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Fish Recipes over 600 fish recipes including tuna, salmon, cod, halibut and more.
Science Daily Benefits Of Eating Fish Greatly Outweigh The Risks, New Study Says
Science Daily Experts Say Consumers Can Eat Around Toxins In Fish
Scientific American Soy and fish protect from cancer: study.