Althouse: "It’s totally maddening... They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy."

April 23, 2012

"It’s totally maddening... They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy."

Whole Foods will no longer sell "red rated fish."

45 comments:

30yearProf said...: I don't shop at the Democrat Party market although it's a close as the others. I vote at my polling place not my grocery store.; 4/23/12, 11:58 AM
Original Mike said...: Hmmm. We buy a lot of fish at Whole Foods. What fish are "red rated"?; 4/23/12, 11:58 AM
traditionalguy said...: Whoa! This is actual Conservation in action, as distinguished from the
CO2 causes warming charade which is really WWIII declared upon us by evil men masquerading as scientists.

A conservative is naturally for conservation of the fish stocks.

Eat Mor Chikin.; 4/23/12, 11:59 AM
ndspinelli said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4/23/12, 11:59 AM
SteveR said...: ndspinelli: we go from totally disagreeing to totally agreeing; 4/23/12, 12:05 PM
lemondog said...: Oprah is red rated?

I heard her network is in trouble........; 4/23/12, 12:09 PM
traditionalguy said...: The Peruvian Sea Bass are endangered because they are so good to eat.

The other narratives involve drag nets that accidentally catch fish that are protected.; 4/23/12, 12:10 PM
Lyssa said...: I found the list of red rated fish confusing. Farmed shrimp? Canned tuna? Tilapia? These are so common (and cheap) at the mega-mart, how are they endangered?; 4/23/12, 12:11 PM
LilyBart said...: They're doing it just to make all the green people happy

Can't make those people happy - not until we're living in mud huts with no running water or electricity and walking everywhere will they be happy. Not THEM of course - but the rest of us.; 4/23/12, 12:13 PM
ndspinelli said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4/23/12, 12:13 PM
bagoh20 said...: The overwhelming motivations of the left world seem to be guilt and self righteousness. It's a combination of sad and ugly.

They will never get me to join their clique with that crap, although the parties look fun, and I could totally fake it for a few hours.; 4/23/12, 12:16 PM
Sigivald said...: Imagine that.

Whole Foods targeting its core market!; 4/23/12, 12:17 PM
Fen said...: Reminds me that I forgot to burn all my excess tires on Earth Day.

Back soon.; 4/23/12, 12:18 PM
bagoh20 said...: The great thing about Whole Foods is the freshly prepared stuff. It's not cheap, but it's pretty good quality, and you get to watch them make it for you. Also they have a lot of free samples out, which I enjoy. They will usually give you a free taste of anything they have made if you ask for it. I know people (teenagers) who go in there and just walk around the store sampling everything until they are full. They're not my kids of course.; 4/23/12, 12:22 PM
Sydney said...: I see that good old Lake Erie perch are OK (green). I always worry a little bit about eating anything that grows in that lake, though.; 4/23/12, 12:27 PM
Quaestor said...: Lyssa wrote:
I found the list of red rated fish confusing. Farmed shrimp? Canned tuna? Tilapia? These are so common (and cheap) at the mega-mart, how are they endangered?

Greenies don't like aquaculture any more than they like commercial fishing. Those red ratings are mostly bullshit statistics complied by earnest types on a mission, not the best frame of mind for doing science.

Does conformation bias ring a bell? ... Anyone? ... Bueller?; 4/23/12, 12:29 PM
Wince said...: Please note, Spiny Dogfish is on the "Good Alternatives" and "Avoid" lists, depending on where it's caught.; 4/23/12, 12:36 PM
prairie wind said...: A conservative is naturally for conservation of the fish stocks.

Fishermen feel the same way.; 4/23/12, 12:45 PM
MadisonMan said...: Fishermen have bills to pay. I'm sure it sucks to lose a market that is lucrative.; 4/23/12, 12:47 PM
Curious George said...: Whole Foods? I was certain they were out of business after that boycott over the Obamacare deal.

Huh.; 4/23/12, 12:52 PM
Carnifex said...: Got no problem with Whole Foods doing this. As an American Corporation, if they don't want to make money, more power to them. It doesn't effect me in the least. I don't shop at WF. Never even been inside one, don't ever plan to go.

All store fish is looked at askance. Especially the stuff from Asia. I wouldn't touch that stuff with Al Gore's pole.

I'll stick with the stuff I catch myself. I know where its been, know what its been eating, and know how its been treated since being caught.

Taste pretty damn good too.(I think even Garage and I can agree on that point)

Ps. The Government is starting to crack down on places that sell one fish for another, but it still goes on too much. If you buy a fish, make sure it's not just filets unless you trust the vendor. They will also rename a fish to make it seem more palatable...ie)dolphin got renamed mahi mahi (not the greatest example but the one I could come up with off the top of my head); 4/23/12, 1:04 PM
Nora said...: This is a ruse. An excuse to rise prices, as all sustainable/organic/green/etc farming is, in addition to giving paying jobs to some unemployable junk scientists, petty politicians and overpaid bureaucrates.

BTW, the only place that I ever got stale nuts in bulk section is WholeFoods. It happend when we went there first time to check what all the fuss is about.

Since my guys love anything fishy they gave a try to their excellent selection of fish and seafood, and decided that it's grossly overpriced. Since then we only buy selection of oysters a couple of times a year, when our older kid comes to visit.; 4/23/12, 1:05 PM
David said...: George, Whole Foods has made a roaring business comeback. "Everybody" wants one in their neighborhood, so they get primo locations.

In Chicago we had a Whole Foods just down the street. Nice place to shop. Wide isles, among other things.

Where I live now, the nearest Whole Foods is over a 100 miles away. We have survived quite happily without it.

We've got Publix, Food Lion, Bi-Lo, Piggly-Wiggly and Wal-Mart. The Publix is the "upscale" market, but I buy all my fresh fruits and veggies at Wal-Mart. They have by far the best produce around, as good as Whole Foods imho, though with a bit less selection in the "exotics."; 4/23/12, 1:08 PM
Calypso Facto said...: dolphin got renamed mahi mahi

Mahi mahi is dolphinfish NOT dolphin. Fish, not mammal.

Like dogs, doplhins continue to be red rated by most of us.; 4/23/12, 1:44 PM
Calypso Facto said...: *dolphins; 4/23/12, 1:45 PM
Curious George said...: @ David: I was joking. The boycott actually helped their sales.; 4/23/12, 1:50 PM
Alex said...: I want to get this straight. Conservatives are for depleting the fish stocks because they can't control their greedy urges? I thought conservatives meant conservation. You're just a bunch of freakin' sociopaths.; 4/23/12, 1:59 PM
David said...: Lyssa, I don't know about other varieties but when I lived in Scotland I saw how they "farm" Atlantic salmon. Huge pens in open water where the fish are stuffed with prepared food. They are also blasted with antibiotics because the very crowded conditions make disease a big issue. It literally looks like fish in a barrel.

In a sense the salmon are like the chickens who just eat and shit and never walk around. They grow big fast but they lack the flesh tone of a wild fish. Flabby fish.

I found the whole thing disgusting. As a consequence I will not eat farmed fish of any kind, though from the list it seems that the Fish Police have determined that certain kinds of fish farming are "better" than others. By what criteria I have no clue.; 4/23/12, 2:00 PM
Alex said...: There is a reason it's called Whole Paycheck, only wealthy people can afford to do their weekly shopping there. Trader Joes for the rest of us proles.; 4/23/12, 2:00 PM
Anonymous said...: I generally don't wring my hands about animal populations, but I'll bet if you gave me a few billion (just six Solyndras or so - a bargain) and a free hand I could run many fish stocks to commercial extinction. In RI, I can get truly fresh sword, but I won't eat it. They are landing puny pre-juveniles and I'm not gonna be able to eat it anyway if that continues.; 4/23/12, 2:15 PM
edutcher said...: If you eat a red rated fish, does that make it X-rated?

Or is that just the smell?; 4/23/12, 2:26 PM
roesch/voltaire said...: Nothing wrong with trying to balance profit with some regard for our future; it is not a matter of right or left but a simple understanding of how to maintain a food source.; 4/23/12, 2:56 PM
K in Colorado said...: Speaking of Sprouts, I'm old enough to have shopped at the original Whole Foods in Austin, TX, back when it was similar to Sprouts. After Whole Foods started to expand to other Austin locations, they quickly morphed from being the no glamour organic/bulk foods store, to the place of choice for the upscale clientele.

We used to do some shopping there to get special items or quality meats for that special dinner. My wife and I could always tell which people in the store had the Mercedes or Jaguar in the parking lot, since they were the ones with their shopping cart full to the top. The rest of us 99% couldn’t afford that. Of course, today, the most common car you see in the Whole Foods’ parking lot is a Prius.; 4/23/12, 3:12 PM
285exp said...: Works for me, I hope more restaurants and stores quit selling red snapper. The Feds have been steadily reducing both the limits and season for recreational fishermen, even though the stocks are the best they've been in years. Last year the season was seven weeks long, two fish per person per day, but because we had done such a fine job of rebuilding the fishery the NMFS declared that the fish we caught were so big that we had overfished our quota and so they reduced the 2012 season to 6 weeks. They use junk science to project how many pounds of snapper that recreational fishermen catch, and they're killing the charter boat fishermen and recreational fishermen in favor of the commercial sector.; 4/23/12, 3:18 PM
Carnifex said...: @CALYPSO

Yes. That's what I said. If I misled I apologize for the scare. I grew up knowing dolphin, and dolphin were 2 different things, and sometimes forget in my old age.

A more proper and less confusing example would have been renaming the Slimehead, the Patagonian Toothfish, or the Goosefish as Orange Roughy, Chilean Sea Bass, and Monkfish.

We could just go all PETA and call 'em SEA KITTENS.; 4/23/12, 3:19 PM
dbp said...: The decision by Whole Foods seems Win, Win Loose to me.

Whole Foods customers seem to support this, so it looks like good for the company and its customers.

People like me who love seafood but are price conscious win because now the fish which would have gone to Whole Foods might make it to the grocery stores I shop at.

The fishermen loose. They are unlikely to get as good a price from plebeian stores as they got at Whole Foods.; 4/23/12, 3:23 PM
Comanche Voter said...: Having smelleld the fish counter at my local Whole Foods (Glendale, CA--it was the largest Whole Foods Market west of the Mississippi when it opened up a few years back) I haven't been buying ANY fish there. There's a very good local fish market about 6 blocks away--and I don't see any percentage in eating any fish from a place that smells.; 4/23/12, 3:50 PM
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...: Hey, I'm as conservative as they come, yet not only do I shop at Whole Foods on a regular basis ... I sell them a nice quantity of my certified-organic produce. They are good, conscientious buyers, paying a very fair price.

That said, my family started their fishing business in 1870 (the produce side began in produce two years earlier) and we have none of us bought Red Snapper for at least fifteen years.

It's delicious, but Whole Foods made the correct choice here, since Snapper stocks are in some trouble. I grew up eating cod for breakfast, and have seen what happened to cod stocks, especially for the in-shore fishers like our family.

Let's keep it from happening to the huachinango.; 4/23/12, 4:10 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: I went into this little health food store downtown and picked out a frozen chicken. Baked it in a casserole dish in the oven, so little oven in an oven. Very flavorful. The most flavorful ever. A bit gamy. Intriguing. Turns out to be free range, organic, no biotics, a bit small. I paid $9.00 for it and that was a lot. It was a successful experiment.

Went back bought 4 for a dinner party and 3 more casserole dishes to cook them. Very successful dinner. Too bad I didn't know about soup bones then.

I have not been able to duplicate those two excellent experiences. When I look for that and think I find it, the chickens cost $24.00 and $26.00 the two times I bothered. Both were not nearly as flavorful or nearly gamey as those small frozen first ones.

Whole Foods does a very nice job with their organic chickens. They're usually about $9.00 or so which isn't so bad compared to the others. They offer organic and free range and both, but their regular chicken is organic and quite good.

But I can get two very plump whole battery chickens for that price at Sam's club or at Cosco, for that cost, or one very plump chicken already roasted and they do a very good job of that too. For a dinner party, you can buy a couple of roasted chickens and not even bother with the fuss, which can come in really handy. This happened twice: due to my charm and my ease of manipulation and my mad skills I am assigned the task of fulfilling the food for a reception of people I do not know. Actually, that happens more than I like but twice I used these chickens and they are perfect. You can also pick up all the wiggly greens that white people don't know the names of and food orbs, mostly fruit, to decorate the platters and pretend the whole thing is professional.; 4/23/12, 4:22 PM
ndspinelli said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4/23/12, 5:42 PM
madAsHell said...: I like the Whole Foods business model. Charge a premium for less. Pretend that everything is in short supply.

By the way...."Has anybody seen the price of arugula at Whole Foods?"; 4/23/12, 7:15 PM
roesch/voltaire said...: Bart Hall thanks for your comments and experience--nice to see a sane conservative with experience in the field join in the discussion.; 4/23/12, 8:41 PM
AlanKH said...: What fish are "red rated"?

Commie fish?; 4/23/12, 9:37 PM
DaveO said...: No, it's a clear present value calculation. Future sales of a restocked red snapper fishery are worth more than present day sales for a finite number of yers,; 4/23/12, 10:01 PM
DEEBEE said...: Curried snapper steaks are my fav.
Thanks whole foods for easing price pressure.
Now only if others outlets follow Whole Food, i could get it real cheap at my favorite local chinese fish shop. MMM MMM MMM; 4/24/12, 5:11 AM