True Color

They say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ and I’d say the same with salmon. Certainly its flesh is visually appetizing with bright and vivid orange-red flesh, but who knows how to tell the real level of freshness there? The common understanding has that you should always get those cuts with firm meat in distinctive red and white. Because of this standard, fish farms would add some extra shots of pigment-inducing substance in the feeding process, and the result is tons of appealing salmon flesh that totally convince consumers of their natural freshness and health benefits – practically a cosmetic surgery to facilitate sale.

The worst thing for us then, is that it becomes very hard to distinguish fresh cuts from the bad ones just by looking at them, as the dyes preserve the fresh look. Plenty of salmon here are catered as sashimi in Japanese restaurants and I for one will not be a fan…

Speaking of which, I’m putting up this photo taken at a lunch in Singapore. What I ordered was a sashimi platter, but what is that on the top left? A salmon ‘sashimi’ with skin attached, slightly grilled on the surface! I was seriously offended by the food, it felt like eating toilet. But I guess when the hot sticky weather is not helping, one might just try to be creative.