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Trendy Tilapia

Tilapia has become quite the trendy fish lately. I see it on more and more restaurant menus. I hear people talking about eating it. I see it in “regular” (i.e. middle class) grocery stores at prices far above what it used to sell for.

I have never eaten it, and don’t have any desire to. I’m not saying I won’t ever eat it, but I certainly won’t be making the choice to order or buy it myself. This is fairly odd, because I am generally an adventurous eater who is up for trying almost anything once.

Tilapia used to be a “trash” fish, very cheap and found in markets in lower income neighborhoods, and I never saw it on restaurant menus. Now, that isn’t what I have against it. Lobster used to be a trash fish too, and I quite enjoy lobster.

I feed my own dogs (never the fosters) a raw food diet. Now London was kind of known for eating anything and everything. He never want off his feed for little illnesses, he has only ever turned down food when he was literally dying. He also ate a door, a remote, a box of tampons (including the box, but carefully removing the wrappers), a Costco sized bottle of Liquid Advil, and the list goes on.

Because a lot of what is great to feed dogs are odd cuts of meat that don’t often make it to the typical middle class white bread American table, I often shopped at ethnic markets or markets in poorer areas in order to find things like chicken feet, and lamb heart and the like. I like to give the dogs fish, especially being a husky and a husky mix, which as originally bred consume a lot of fish for protein source, but I don’t feed it all the time because of the expense. The dogs always looked on it as a special treat, and London was especially fond of salmon.

Then one day I spotted tilapia in the market. It was below my protein price point for dog food, and I quickly bought a package to take home to the dogs.

I prepped their food bowls that night and plopped them down and both dogs dug in.

Then both dogs spit out the tilapia and stared at me, “What the fuck is this shit?”  No amount of coaxing or refusing to offer them anything else would convince them to eat it. They carefully ate all the other things around it, and left behind the tilapia in disgust.  They think cat turds covered in kitty litter is the best treat ever, and they outright refused to eat tilapia.

So yeah, whenever I see it on a menu, or hear people talking about making it, I always just think of it as the one thing that London totally refused to eat.

It just isn’t appealing to me.

Mealtime at MsTori's Orphanage
New and Fluffy

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2 Responses to “Trendy Tilapia”

  1. Rachel says:

    I like Tilapia and eat it/buy it and order it at restaurants, but I am surprised that it’s such a trendy, expensive fish right now.

    I nearly fell over at Costco the other day, though, because they wanted $8/lb for Cod. Cod. Cod? *sigh*

    My dog is the same way. He’ll eat “kitty krispies”. He’ll eat his own frozen shit that he finds outside. But he won’t eat carrots or mushrooms. WTF?

  2. Stacy says:

    **FASCINATING!!!**

    Tilapia’s a big hit among urban homesteaders because it’s so easy to grow in aquaponics systems. We’ve actually been discussing putting in an aquaponics system around here lately after seeing how nicely E’s bro’s koi pond is growing strawberries this past weekend.

    But E doesn’t like cooked fish much, of any kind. Shrimp are too territorial to make them efficient. Perhaps I should just go with koi (cod) for the pretty and eat/sell the brown ones…

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