A recurring thread here has been food myths of the illiberal pseudo-environmentalist posers, a collection of mindless dogmas that serve both the environment and human health poorly but somehow became fashionable in less thoughtful circles. The post Liberal Myths engaged the problem from a loosely academic perspective since it is rooted in the failures of liberal arts education.

If I had to identify people who most absolutely represent the highest ideals of a liberal arts education, I would start with the hosts of the television show Mythbusters.

If you’re not familiar with the show, the basic premise is that they take a commonly held belief or a commonly repeated cultural trope and try to concretely test its plausibility using some version of the scientific method.

This quote from Jamie Hyneman, one of the MythBusters hosts, sets the bar.

You can’t expect to teach someone everything he or she needs to know. A broad foundation of experience allows you to extrapolate things with which you have no direct experience. Specialists are usually in danger of not seeing the forest for the trees. If you acquire both a broad foundation and deep knowledge in a specific thing, you become much more dynamic in that area. If one takes both of these things to extremes, something truly transcendental can happen.

This resonates with the Eric Drexler posts quoted in Soul Butter about How to Understand Everything (and Why) and How to Learn About Everything.

The meat of the post Liberal Myths applied this sort of thinking to a crass article by a narrow minded foodie Mark Bittman - a fish advocate who exposed his ignorance by attacking meat foods. He has another article that is belatedly facing some of the problems with his unexamined biases.

IN 1994, I published my first book, “Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking.” The premise was straightforward: if you buy fish fresh and cook it simply, you’ll eat well. . .

Merely buying a piece of fish has become so challenging that when my publisher asked if I wanted to revise the book, I felt I had to decline. The cooking remains unchanged, but the buying has become a logistical and ethical nightmare.

This was well known in 1994, and had been widely known for some time. Fish is logistically and ethically a poor choice for nutrition whatever its merits, and has increasingly become a health threat as well. Only someone who lacks an effective liberal education and engages in affected ignorance - ignorance too useful to be cured - could have been an advocate of fish for the masses (even the elite masses) at that late date in history. And, he is still the same muddled thinker.

None of this changed a basic fact about fish: cooked with almost nothing else, it outshines every other animal in terms of ease of cooking and variety of tastes and textures. The best fish dishes — grilled toro, pils-pils, fried shrimp, boiled lobster, smoked salmon, barely cooked bay scallops, you name it — are not only among the greatest culinary pleasures, they’re among the least fussy.

Well, shrimp and lobster are not fish, and what sense does it make to compare all of these sea species to any single animal species? Comparing sea species to land species might make some sense - not much, but some. One might well have a preference for fishes, crustaceans, mollusks etc. rather than mammals, marsupials, poultry and reptiles.

The alternative that always comes up is farm-raised fish, the eating of which has been downgraded from a panacea to our only remaining option. But with the exception of mollusks, which have been farmed forever with little environmental impact and sometimes with as much flavor as wild, most of the products of aquaculture are not only not worth cooking but are also environmentally challenged.

In fact, farm-raised fin fish are really the cage-raised chickens of the sea: in many instances wild fish are harvested to produce feed for farmed fish (nearly 90 percent of the world’s fish oil goes into fish food), and it takes three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon (other farmed species require even more). Aquaculture is also a local pollutant and a major consumer of antibiotics, and it has long been thought that escaped farmed fish will interbreed with and weaken wild fish.

Well-intentioned people are working on making aquaculture more appealing, and ultimately, I think, we will see two categories of farm-raised fish. One will be the equivalent of grass-fed beef or heritage pork, well taken care of, tasty enough, and exclusively for the well-to-do. The other will be tilapia and its ilk, fish that live on plants and can be raised and sold relatively inexpensively. It will taste better than it does now, though probably still not fabulous. My guess is that this is 10 years off. Meanwhile, I mostly avoid farm-raised fish.

Grass fed beef and pork isn't elite food, it is poverty food. It's what the poorest people in the world eat, when they have something to eat. Rich people who eat it are slumming. IMV it's the best food, and certainly the healthiest food, but the idea that it is rare and expensive is nonsense. There are local scarcities due to local norms and preferences, but that's a cultural and marketing issue, not something that is fixed and unchanging.

I don’t eat fish as often as I once did. (I don’t promote eating it as I once did, either.) . . .

I’m probably not going to stop eating fish. And fortunately I don’t have to, since there are species that have never been depleted — squid and mackerel, for example — and those that have recovered, like haddock and Maine lobster.

It’s improbable that I’ll eat in a perfectly sustainable manner, even though I probably eat one-third as much fish as I did a few years ago. I’m trying not to let perfect become the enemy of good, and I’m trying to find a place that feels comfortable. That place is to see eating fish as a treat. I won’t eat it daily or in huge quantities, but occasionally, with appreciation. The days of “see it/eat it” are gone.

Well, good. Better late than never. Wild fish is a delicacy, as are wild land animals. It could not be otherwise in a world so fully populated with humans. Wild grain and vegetables are delicacies too. Duh! I fish, hunt and forage a small amount. A trout from a high mountain stream is exquisite, not least because of the setting, circumstances and effort involved. A blackberry wrested from the thorny clutches of a wild bush on a hot day and gobbled on the spot is a revelation. But that's not a way to feed the world, or even the richest among us.