Not to worry, @Frank Sanoica , the encyclopedias have been wrong before. I was just reading that the Funk and Wagnalls, from around 1934, said a person would die of starvation in only 8 days. The reason that this is important, is that one of the doctors of the time decided that he could starve for 8 days and kill himself. He had a whole slew of illnesses, plus arthritis and I think, diabetes. In any case, after 8 days, he was not dead, as he supposed, but he found that his pain was going away, so he continued to do fasting (intermittent ?) until he was well and healthy again.
In general, @Yvonne Smith if there is a "general scientific consensus", you can almost assume that it is wrong. You of course recall the "Ice Age threat" of the 1970s, the switch from saturated fats to trans fat as a healthy alternative, then the move to a fat-free diet heavy in carbohydrates, the idea that one would die from a single dose of 10,000 IU of Vitamin D, etc. All were general scientific consensus and all were proven wrong or inaccurate by simple "testing the hypothesis". Biology has changed greatly with the availability of DNA testing. Remember people being ridiculed for referring to a "Panda Bear"? According to biologists I have spoken with, great pandas are now known to be closely related to bears, but not related to the lesser or the Red Panda, which had been previously thought to be a close relative. You can find the biggest changes in the world of microbiology, where so many species have changed with genome evaluation that a bacteriologist of the 1960s couldn't relate to the classifications and names of today.
I've just noticed that this thread is near the top of the second page of search engine results in Bing on searches of "How often do you eat fish," which is good. As for fish, I love several kinds of fish but my wife doesn't, so we don't have it often; maybe once or twice a month.
Wow, Alonzo would be proud with that kind of visibility. I don't eat fish as much as I once did because finding wild-caught is difficult and expensive. Sadly most available and affordable is Chinese farm raised in sewer water. Once a local small Mexican restaurant that specialized in wild caught off the Pacific coast of Mexico closed, I haven't had a decent filet. He sauteed the filet in garlic and butter. We have one place that has some real unbreaded but saute-cooked wild caught Red Snapper tacos and they are great, but tacos with a bit of fish, can't compare to a full fillet. Most places just use a heavily breaded cod fillet in their tacos. That I can pass on. My favorite fish is fresh caught Pacific Ling Cod but that requires a trip to the coast and a tycoon bank account.
We eat fish, but it is mostly whatever gets caught by us or our children. Freshwater trout occasionally, but mostly salmon we get out of local streams. Alaska has a Personal Use/subsistence fishery that is available to residents only at several points around the state where we catch salmon in nets, not with a rod and reel, so we are allowed 35 salmon a year by that method since it is just two of us now. When we had the kids at home, it was a mainstay of our diet and a fun family outing as well. The first fishery to open outside the ice fishery is hooligan/smelt which is technically open now, but the river is still iced over most places. We used to do that during the last two weeks of May, as it was fun for the kids and was also done with nets. When we lived in the bush there was a different species of smelt and we would pickle them for the boys and their friends to eat for much of the summer. The pickling process dissolved the bones but left the flesh intact. The hooligan we get here don't hold together, so pickling them just turns to mush, so most of the fish we caught every spring became "dogsickles", as they were very high fat and just the right size to use as a snack for the sled dogs. They were frozen individually and bagged up for winter use. We sometimes do salt water fishing, but I don't have a boat suitable for that, and, as @Faye Fox said, it is quite expensive to use other's boats. Youngest son now has a boat that can be used near-shore, so we may get salt water salmon, halibut, and perhaps cod or rockfish this year. We'll see.... There is also a personal-use shrimp fishery, but we have never done that.
That's the way it was when I was a kid. My older brothers loved fishing so they'd bring fish home often. As for me, I thought fishing was boring so I didn't do it, having never really discerned the provider aspect of it.
. Don't you have Pike in your streams and rivers? We have Walleye here. We have yearly Salmon runs and many put a lot of salmon in their freezer. I tried drying it one year using the old Indian methods that one Indian village along the river still uses. Old Indian fishing platform on the river
We sometimes catch channel catfish down at the river. They live out in the sound and come in to spawn. They are really good eating but they are a pain to clean.
We had some whole frozen tilapia, and Bobby cooked it on the Egg BBQ, and it was absolutely delicious ! I have had the tilapia filets from the store before, but didn’t care of them all that much, especially compared to salmon or trout. The bbq’ed ones were much more flavorful, lots of bones to pick out though. Next time, bobby is going to put some wood in the BBQ and cook the fish longer and slower, so it will be more like smoked fish. When I used to live in Missouri and had the catfish ponds, I always used to cook them on the bbq, and they tasted much better to me than the deep fried ones do.
@Yvonne Smith , let me know how they turn out. I've been wondering how fish would taste when cooked over charcoal.
The ones we had were cooked on our charcoal BBQ, @Shirley Martin , and they were SO delicious ! They had a lot of flavor, and were not dry, and didn’t really take that long on the grill. I baked some winter squash in the toaster oven while Bobby cooked the fish. We had fun picking out all of the bones and other inedible parts, and I buried those in the garden for compost.
My parents loved fishing and eating fish. Guess that skipped a generation. I remember my dad loved smoked mullet. (Which reminds me that my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Price, would call any one misbehaving in class a mullet. None of us cried or sued him that I recall.)
We have pike in lakes and rivers, but it is considered an invasive species in all but the Yukon River I think. It destroys the salmon and burbot, and if you catch a pike in this area, it is against the law to release it alive.