3 ms·

I'm not so sure about the incertitude you speak of about omega-3s content and ratios in food. In fact while in Japan I used to specifically select my bags of d

I'm not so sure about the incertitude you speak of about omega-3s content and ratios in food. In fact while in Japan I used to specifically select my bags of dried sardine (niboshi) and mackerel cans by the content of EPA and DHA, clearly indicated in mg per 100g. Every such products had these indications with content varying by brands. I guess that if you master your process you can ensure and advertise a consistent quality.

derefr 2y ago
Processed fish products are a bit different from a large chunk of a single fish, in terms of the promises that can be made. The problem with large, wild-caught fish, is that different fish are going to be living in slightly-different regions, or migrating through given regions at slightly-different times, and so eating different things; and so will have more or less of any given nutrient coming from those things in their bodies. If you're catching large swarms/schools of fish, all the fish in a given school will be mostly identical in their nutritional content. And so, if you're doing some bulk operation like canning or drying, and you're doing it on fish that swarm/school and get caught as whole swarms/schools (such as sardine or mackerel) — then, for each catch delivered to your plant by a fishing vessel, you can take a few samples from that catch to get a sense of the average micronutrient values of that catch; and then you can store these catches separately, titrating together the different catches into each processed mixture, to achieve the a steady nutritional value in the result. (This is roughly the same thing that e.g. orange juice companies do with the truckloads of oranges they buy to achieve a consistent output juice product.) But if you're just buying e.g. one salmon, then it came through an entirely different logistics pipeline to get to you — either an "independent" one where a small-time fisherman sold some fish directly to a local fishmonger, who then sold it directly to a local grocer, a few fish at a time; or a "big chain" one where a stream of flash-frozen fish from fishing vessels is being just-in-time streamed out to various grocery stores. (This lack of a fan-in processing step for raw large fish is also why grocers end up with so much mislabelled fish; the guy who works at a fish processing plant near the fishery will recognize all the fish that fishery tends to pull out of the water; but there's no similar expert in the meat department of a random grocery store in Idaho — in fact, that person might not even know which fishery the fish they're receiving came from!)

derefr 2y ago

Processed fish products are a bit different from a large chunk of a single fish, in terms of the promises that can be made. The problem with large, wild-caught fish, is that different fish are going to be living in slightly-different regions, or migrating through given regions at slightly-different times, and so eating different things; and so will have more or less of any given nutrient coming from those things in their bodies. If you're catching large swarms/schools of fish, all the fish in a given school will be mostly identical in their nutritional content. And so, if you're doing some bulk operation like canning or drying, and you're doing it on fish that swarm/school and get caught as whole swarms/schools (such as sardine or mackerel) — then, for each catch delivered to your plant by a fishing vessel, you can take a few samples from that catch to get a sense of the average micronutrient values of that catch; and then you can store these catches separately, titrating together the different catches into each processed mixture, to achieve the a steady nutritional value in the result. (This is roughly the same thing that e.g. orange juice companies do with the truckloads of oranges they buy to achieve a consistent output juice product.) But if you're just buying e.g. one salmon, then it came through an entirely different logistics pipeline to get to you — either an "independent" one where a small-time fisherman sold some fish directly to a local fishmonger, who then sold it directly to a local grocer, a few fish at a time; or a "big chain" one where a stream of flash-frozen fish from fishing vessels is being just-in-time streamed out to various grocery stores. (This lack of a fan-in processing step for raw large fish is also why grocers end up with so much mislabelled fish; the guy who works at a fish processing plant near the fishery will recognize all the fish that fishery tends to pull out of the water; but there's no similar expert in the meat department of a random grocery store in Idaho — in fact, that person might not even know which fishery the fish they're receiving came from!)