Massaging Octopus and Other Questionable Acts

The New York Times, ever one to embrace diversity, can run a flag-waving article about the plight of bluefin tuna and the future for sushi (deer meat) and then turn around, as it did today, to publish a glowing review of sushi restaurant on New York's 15th Street. The review's clever title Does the Squid Get a Mani-Pedi? was a reference to the laborious massaging of the octopus (PZ's dream job) before its big brain was slow-cooked.

But the reviewer's behavior was even odder than the chef's. He orders essentially everything under the sea, including bluefin tuna, without so much a word on the plight of what's on his palate.

The restaurant was recently promoting, as a special, Copper River salmon, but there was nothing special about the fish, which had a weirdly flat taste, shadowed by nuances that suggested it had been sitting around a bit too long.

Nothing special about the fish? I would expect this type of insensitivity from my midwestern brethren, but this is New York, where people are intellectually promiscuous, politically concerned, and environmentally conscious! RIght? Wrong.

Copper River salmon are nothing special except that more than two million gather every summer to swim sometimes hundreds of miles upstream where they die for their offspring. Nothing special indeed.