January 22, 2009
Food fight: Fish or “sea kitten?”
Written by guest blogger Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian magazine staff writer:
Filet of sea kitten in butter sauce, anyone? PETA’s recently launched “Save the Sea Kittens” campaign aims to rebrand fish as cuddly companions rather than swimming repositories of Omega-3 fatty acids. The Web site presents endearing fish facts and potentially nightmare-inducing bedtime stories, like Tara the Tuna’s adventures at the sea kitten factory farm. Fishing advocacy groups are not persuaded and apparently even kids -– part of the target audience — find the whole business a bit, well, fishy.
But, of course, the re-christening of fish has been ongoing for decades now. The name “Chilean sea bass” was so enticing to diners that the creature formerly known as the Patagonian toothfish was fished almost out of existence in some waters. “Whore’s eggs” were named in poor taste, but “spicy sea urchins” sound mighty tasty. Peekytoe crab was mud crab once upon a time; spotted sunfish was stumpknocker; rock salmon was spiny dogfish.
Someone’s got to have a good “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” – type parody for this phenomenon. Why are fish so tempting to rebrand? And would an orange roughy by any other name taste as sweet? (Because they used to be called slimeheads.)
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I don’t think PETA’s effort will have any traction, here. I’m still going to call salmon “yummy,” “tasty” and/or “delicious.”
The original names have a lot to do with what the fish look like when they’re fresh out of the water, with their heads on. Visit any aquarium and there are some truly weird characters swimming around – I love to look at all the varieties of preposterously non-streamlined and magnificently hideous fish in the world. Once they’ve been filleted, poached and sauced, they tend to look depressingly similar, and much more receptive to an appealing brand name. Still, I prefer my fish with personality…
For an insightful (one-person) discussion about the PETA “sea-kitten” rebranding you should check out The Colbert Report’s “Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger” section from January 15 wherein noted news analyst Stephen Colbert supports PeTAs cause, saying that it will redouble his efforts to focus on eating more “Land Fish”, “Field Potatoes,” and “Sky Nachos.” Talk about personality…
(see the link )
This is ridiculous…is PETA actively trying to turn itself into a joke? I think fish are easily rebranded because people don’t know all of these different species, so it’s easy to give them different names. You can’t so easily rename a cow or a chicken…
Laura,
PETA has been a joke for a very, very long time.