Over the Labor Day weekend, the Perdido Bay Mullet Festival in Lillian, Alabama had to do something it's never had to do before -- substitute catfish for mullet. Why? Because, according to event organizer Bill Cornell, the company that supplies the mullet for the annual festival "didn’t feel good about the fish" and "won’t sell them for human consumption." The seafood supplier, Wallace Seafood, had found unusual white spots on some of the mullet being caught, and won't sell the fish until testing is completed to see if they're safe to eat. According to the company's Brent Wallace, "Mullet feed off the bottom and we don’t know what’s been down there."
Another fisherman raised the same concern as Wallace Seafood -- that mullet are bottom feeders so you don't know what they've been eating -- and added that because of their migratory nature, you also don't know where they've been eating. This fisherman, nicknamed "Red," who talked about the oil not being visible on the surface because the dispersants have made it sink down into the water, explained how mullet eat, sucking just about anything into what he called their "gizzard," the black spot seen on the fish in the video below.
With the very unsurprising revelation reported by NPR last Monday that the oil from the BP oil spill isn't gone, but has merely sunk to the sea floor, it's no big leap to assume that the diet of these bottom-feeding, migratory fish is likely to include just about anything in that "fluffy and porous" layer of oil and "recently dead" things reported by Samantha Joye from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. As David Hollander of the University of South Florida is quoted as saying in the same NPR report, "A lot of fish go down to the bottom and eat and then come back up. And if all their food sources are derived from the bottom, then indeed you could have this impact."
Bottom-feeding fish used as hog feed
Meanwhile, despite these concerns, bottom-feeding fish like mullet are currently being caught and eaten all over the Gulf, with the potential risk not being limited to direct human consumption of the fish, but indirectly by mullet being fed to hogs, as Dr. Norma Bowe of Kean University in New Jersey observed a few weeks ago. Striking up a conversation with some fishermen who were hauling in nets full of mullet from a pier in Long Beach, Mississippi, Dr. Bowe found out that one of the men was also a hog farmer who was catching the mullet to feed to his hogs. The hog farmer, who said he fishes from this pier every day, proudly told Bowe to just ask anybody and they'd tell her that his bacon, pork chops, ham hocks, and ribs are the best around, attributing the high quality of the meat from his hogs to their high protein fish diet. And, according to the fishermen that Bowe spoke to, these fish are also used in a variety of other products for both human and pet consumption -- from Omega-3 fish oil supplements to cat food. Part of this conversation was caught on video by one of Bowe's students.
http://www.truth-out.org/university-groups-raises-bp-oil-spill-contaminants-entering-food-supply63367
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
