last night i drank a LOT of cheap beer at the holiday inn express manager's reception (fyi - all the coors light you can possibly consume in an hour and a half and they don't even ask for your room number. i am a legitimate guest, by the way.) then went out for some good beer and a polish sausage loaded with sauerkraut. choosing not to continue to drink all night (because i'm not very tolerant of hundreds of fourth and fifth graders if i'm nursing a hangover) i headed back to the hotel and watched a super depressing documentary about tanzania and the nile perch in lake victoria and weapons trade and poverty and aids. and then i had bad dreams all night.
today i was showing off dead fish to school groups, talking with them about the adaptations fish have that make it simple for them to live an aquatic life (or a life aquatic). i had a dissected carp on display to show off it's air bladder. the flesh i'd removed was lying next to the carp, and a kid asked me what it was. i explained that it was the part of a fish that you eat - the muscle, and the kid said 'no, no, no - we get fish from the store. it's not like that.' i recalled a scene from last night's movie, a scene in a processing plant where nile perch are being filleted and the carcasses are carted off in big rubbermaid tubs and dumped on a flatbed. these fillets are exported all over europe. (i'm not sure what they're sold as - surely not nile perch.) anyway, then the scene cuts to this flatbed truck delivering the carcasses to what i assumed was a dump. it wasn't. it was another sort of 'processing plant' where women sorted through these filthy dripping maggoty carcasses and hung them to dry in the sun. (i can't imagine the stench and i've been around a lot of dead fish before.) once the fish are dried, their heads and any remaining meat on their bones are fried and sold at local markets, eaten with rice. this is the main fare of a tanzanian farmer. and damn it, the kid didn't understand where a fillet of fish comes from. don't get me wrong, i'm not damning the kid, it just makes me sad.
today i was showing off dead fish to school groups, talking with them about the adaptations fish have that make it simple for them to live an aquatic life (or a life aquatic). i had a dissected carp on display to show off it's air bladder. the flesh i'd removed was lying next to the carp, and a kid asked me what it was. i explained that it was the part of a fish that you eat - the muscle, and the kid said 'no, no, no - we get fish from the store. it's not like that.' i recalled a scene from last night's movie, a scene in a processing plant where nile perch are being filleted and the carcasses are carted off in big rubbermaid tubs and dumped on a flatbed. these fillets are exported all over europe. (i'm not sure what they're sold as - surely not nile perch.) anyway, then the scene cuts to this flatbed truck delivering the carcasses to what i assumed was a dump. it wasn't. it was another sort of 'processing plant' where women sorted through these filthy dripping maggoty carcasses and hung them to dry in the sun. (i can't imagine the stench and i've been around a lot of dead fish before.) once the fish are dried, their heads and any remaining meat on their bones are fried and sold at local markets, eaten with rice. this is the main fare of a tanzanian farmer. and damn it, the kid didn't understand where a fillet of fish comes from. don't get me wrong, i'm not damning the kid, it just makes me sad.
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