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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

People like to level criticism at wine drinkers for subjecting themselves to placebo effects.

Now what about fish eaters? If you can't taste the difference between red snapper and tilapia, why ever buy red snapper? Obviously there are environmental and health reasons to choose one fish species over another, but is that doesn't seem to explicitly be the problem here.

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I love red snapper, I'd like to think I can tell the difference between that and Tilapia (or any other fish). I guess it depends on how you eat your fish. In general I usually buy whole red snapper and can obviously see what it is, it is also quite bonny than most fish.

Unfortunately most American fish preparation methods (deep fry, heavy saucing) basically destroys the fish flavor so people may not develop the ability to differentiate.

How is deep frying and heavy saucing an American thing? The only time I see fish prepared that way is at Chinese resteraunts. Do you mean as English/Scottish fish and chips?

Are you by any chance talking about Chinese restaurants in the u.s.? Most of the time when I had fish in China at restaurants it was whole. With head and everything. So, even if covered with any sauce, you could easily distinguish the fish.

I don't know about the US, but 糖醋鱼 is a popular dish in China, among many other sauce heavy fish dishes.

I grew up eating mostly steamed and smoked fish. In the US often fish is served either deep fried (and breaded) or with some kind of sauce that kills the flavor of the fish.

Of cause "Chinese" restaurants are the quintessential American food joint so they do a lot of deep frying of everything including the fish.

So I grew up in Seattle, and deep fried fish with chips is something you get at ivars, and at that is definitely an English dish (fish wth chips is the national food of the U.K.). The standard American way of cooking a fish is smoked (salmon) or on a barbecue with foil (well, OK, I'm not sure about the east coast).

>Now what about fish eaters? If you can't taste the difference between red snapper and tilapia, why ever buy red snapper?

Well, there's absolutely different taste between some species of fish. Nobody would misunderstood a swordfish for tilapia for example.

Now, some fish are more alike in taste, so that one would either not see much difference in picking one over another, or even attribute the difference from what they expected in this particular catch/bunch they bought being blander.

After all, taste can vary between different items of a single species of fish too (depending on where it was caught, how it was raised, what it ate, age, etc.).

> Now what about fish eaters? If you can't taste the difference between red snapper and tilapia, why ever buy red snapper? Obviously there are environmental and health reasons to choose one fish species over another, but is that doesn't seem to explicitly be the problem here.

Read up on Tilapia farming a bit and you'll never touch the stuff again in your life. The majority of farms pump the frys with hormones to force them all to be males (vs random mix of male/female). This is because males are generally larger, grow faster, and leads to a more uniform product. Not every farm does this (I think there are some in the USA that don't) but the bad apples have poisoned the entire barrel for me. Since I can't tell where it's coming from I won't eat it. Tis a shame too as it's a relatively hardy fish and it can be raised on a purely vegetarian diet.

Taste wise I'm not sure if I could tell the difference between real Grouper and whatever is the knockoff. Would be a fun test to do at home as Grouper tastes awesome. If there's a cheaper substitute that's just as good, I'm all for it!

Morally, I'm not sure if controlling the gender ratio of a fish population is much worse than killing and eating them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the concern were less about morality than about ingesting unduly high doses of hormones which might have some metabolic effect on humans as well as on fish.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the concern were less about morality than about ingesting unduly high doses of hormones which might have some metabolic effect on humans as well as on fish.

Bingo.

I have zero moral issue asserting my dominance as the apex predator of this ball of mud to consume any and all prey that my heart desires.

What I do take issue with is not knowing the long term effects of things like high doses of hormones on us (humans). I'm not educated enough in that field to know if my fears are well founded, but my gut tells me I'll be better off not eating Tilapia so I don't have to worry about my dick falling off (or growing a new one!).

That's the thing though, if wikipedia is to be believed, and testosterone is the hormone most often used, we do know the end effects of consuming it. Sure, testosterone is an insanely powerful hormone, but it's not like the effects of it on humans is misunderstood or harmful.

I'm trying to imagine how much damage could be wrought at even large amounts of tilapia (at least from the hormonal aspect...).

Well, as far as "harmful" goes, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycystic_ovary_syndrome, for a start.

I believe the parent was referring to oral administration of testosterone (or, in the case of most fish, 11-ketotestosterone). Levels in a typical serving of tilapia are probably in the nanogram range. Oral bioavailability in humans of around 3% puts us in the picogram range of dosage, or about a billionth of what the average male produces in a week. You'd need a pretty healthy appetite to get PCOS from tilapia.

Sure. But fish may not be the only animals so treated. And, in any case, you did say that testosterone's effect on humans is not harmful. We have here a case in which it is. There are many others, for this and other hormones. To blithely discount the possibility that eating hormone-treated meat may pose a risk seems therefore rather optimistic.

> I have zero moral issue asserting my dominance as the apex predator of this ball of mud to consume any and all prey that my heart desires.

Delightfully put!

The tilapia from China are literally fed pig shit and packed in ice made from contaminated water. They don't care because the food is being shipped to the US, which doesn't check it. I will never eat tilapia again, or any food product from China.

That's a good point. Still not getting what you paid for is a type of theft and a type of deception. The most obvious example would be counterfeit clothing.

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