Fish As Food

Put a fish on my plate and pretty soon I will get frustrated. When hungry, I am ill-tempered. When taunted by a complex morsel containing approximately one mouthful of food guarded by an almost infinite number of tiny bone-shaped militia men, I am smash-your-own-skull-and-eat-your-brain incensed.

‘It’s easy’, people always say. ‘Just eat to the layer of bones and then pull them all out whilst they’re still attached to the spine.’ Then they add, ‘there’ll be a couple left, but probably only small ones’.

In reality there are perhaps five percent of the bones remaining hidden in the flesh. On your average fish, this equates to fifty-thousand pointed surprises waiting to either drive a hole in the roof of your mouth or, more likely, lodge in your windpipe making you gag. By the time you’ve fiddled round with every mouthful, dissecting it and removing the bones until you’re left with a pea-sized lump of mashed flesh, fish have evolved to have even more bones to ward off predatory humans.

Fish aren’t food.