PSA: Tilapia /= Catfish
Last month I was sitting around in the TA office and someone commented, scornfully, that “tilapia” was just a fancy name to make the stupid bourgeois eat catfish. Having been raised relatively bourgeois, I blinked and did not mention that I had never heard that tilapia was catfish. It did actually make a fair amount of sense. Who among us had heard about tilapia, say, six years ago? Not bad evidence of some kind of clever marketing ploy, I thought.
I was so convinced that I even attempted to pass it on to a carful of people on our way to the Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale over at West Towne Mall,* although I did admit that I didn’t have independent confirmation.
Keely was a little skeptical, although she allowed that she hadn’t heard of tilapia before she moved to Madison, but argued that since she didn’t eat fish before then, why would she have noticed? Other passengers, however, confirmed that they, too, had only become aware of tilapia in the past few years.
So when I got home, I looked it up online and discovered: tilapia and catfish are about as distantly related as it is possible to be and both be FISH. Wikipedia informed me that tilapia are of the family “Cichlidae” while catfish are classified into about 50 freaking different families,** NONE of which are “Cichlidae.” According to the Wikipedia catfish entry–which, sure, take with a grain of salt–5% of vertebrate species are catfish. AND YET. Tilapia? Not catfish.
Being motivated to correct the misconception I had inadvertently been spreading, I brought it up when I called home in the evening, which set Dad off, and led to his confirmation–he, too, turned immediately to Wikipedia–that catfish and tilapia are, as noted, as totally dissimilar as two fish can be. I don’t know if “not tasting like much of anything” would be considered a phenotypical similarity or not; as my friend Crystal says, people fry catfish because they like the taste of fry and the catfish are handy.
By “set Dad off,” I mean that we are both compulsive reference checkers. I may or may not have previously related the story of an argument I got into with some of the girls in my 8th grade gym class, the subject of which I have long forgotten although some corner of my mind is convinced it had something to do with gypsies–I could totally be making that up–and so I went home and looked it up that night and came back in, the next day, vindicated, and told them loftily that I was, in fact, totally right and backed up by encyclopedic sources.
For some reason no one was at all impressed, and I was probably lucky to escape the interaction without being stuffed into a locker. It turns out that citations are not pertinent to junior high debate. So now you know why I’m in graduate school.***
Dad, anyway, had apparently known about tilapia since the early 80s, when they were the hot new thing at the University of Arizona’s School of Agriculture. They can be raised in very densely populated tanks, or, for that matter, in irrigation canals. The internet also tells me that they only require 1.2 pounds of feed to put on one pound of flesh, which compared to 6-8 pounds of feed for one pound of cattle flesh is pretty damn good. Plus, you know, they taste like whatever sauce you put on them.
And goddamn are they cheap. I picked up a bunch of frozen fish at Trader Joe’s this week as part of my effort to get back into shape, and you can get over a pound of tilapia for $4. That’s at least three meals right there. If I had a drainage ditch I could cut out the middleman… but I think I’m willing to pay for Trader Joe’s to handle it. Now the real question: what do I put on it when I bake it for dinner tonight?
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*The sale started three days ago so it’s probably hopelessly picked over by now, plus any time you enter the VS store you’ll be surrounded by 12-year-olds, but the sale seems to bring out the especially inappropriate, e.g. the woman who was dragging her approx. 8-year-old daughter from bin to bin screaming, “Let’s look for some EXTRA SMALLS for you!” I mostly try not to judge other people’s parenting and god knows I am no arbiter of What Is Appropriate, but sweet fancy Moses, someone is going to be telling a therapist about this someday.
**To be totally accurate, 36–unless my finger slipped while I was counting down the list.
***Also, of course, a number of my family members went to graduate school. I don’t know if my father’s father was a compulsive reference checker or not, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise.
January 6th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Yeah, tilapia was originally meant to be a kind of cure for world hunger, since they breed so readily.
January 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I’ve known about tilapia for decades but then again I’m gay and that gives me inherent knowledge of exotic foods.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it tastes much like catfish at all. Also, the texture is noticeably different to me. But then again I’m gay and that gives me a super-sensitivity to such things.
For some reason, I associate tilapia with Mexico and Mexican seafood. Did your research uncover if it’s a common fish in Mexican waters?
January 6th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I think what this person is probably referring to is the current controversy over grouper, whereby Asian catfishes are being sold as grouper in Florida (where grouper is like, the state fish, and there isn’t enough to go around).
Having grown up within a metaphoric stones throw of the worlds largest wholesale fish market, I’ve been eating tilapia for almost a decade, as it not only is easily farm raised, it’s also a hardy fish and can withstand relatively northerly waters, so I believe there are relatively “local” tilapia farms.
Having been a manager of a fish department in a pet store, however, I can also tell you that tilapia are nasty fishes, just like any other cichlid, and they grow super fast. People buy them as three inch fries and soon they have a foot long, aggressive as all hell, monstrosity on their hands. This one guy had two tilapia and every week would buy fifty 2-inch feeders for them. He was getting really frustrated with it, so I suggested cooking them, and he looked at me really strangly. Then I told him tilapia is the most common white fish, now that cod is depleted, and if he wanted proof, Stop n Shop was in the same strip mall, he could go over to their fish dept and check.
Anyway, I just checked the wiki page on tilapia, and the variety we sold as such were of the tilapia genus and were aggressive carnivors. I don’t remember the species name; we just called them talapia. I believe it was these fuckers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilapia_buttikoferi
January 6th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Oh and perhaps not totally irrelevant to the conversation: all tilapia is kosher; no catfish is kosher. They don’t have scales. However, the official OU website warns the Jews that the unscrupulous fish mongers might try to pass off cheaper catfish as tilapia. So really, if you want to be sure you aren’t being had, check to see if its kosher. Still, I’m with Travis: catfish doesn’t taste like tilapia!
January 6th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
I have never heard of tilapia either (but then I’m a non-fish-eater).
It is certainly true, though, that fish tend to be called different things in different places, and then not necessarily marketed under their most commonly used name. I remember seeing at least two or three little items in the food section of the weekend papers at different times in the past year or so, all saying “did you know X fish is more commonly known as Y?”
Reasons given include: choosing a less common name because overfishing has been well publicised, and middle-class consumers know to avoid it; because the most common one doesn’t sound very appetising; or just to sound exotic. Tilapia does sound better than catfish, so I can see why someone might have misremembered catfish as being a name the marketers would want to change.
We have lately been somewhat annoyed that our local supermarket is still selling frozen cod, even though the basic message at the moment is that nobody should be catching those for the forseeable future. You don’t see it for sale much any more, though; Alaska pollock seems to be filling its culinary niche. Which was featured in some newspapers as A Threat to the Great British Fish Supper. Sigh.
January 6th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
OMG, my mother-in-law *loves* tilapia. We eat it every time we’re home, but maybe that’s because we’re veggies who also eat fish. She absolutely treats it as working class bourgie. Anyway, this seems way less controversial than the utter rage caused by some in the tangerine / clementine debates.
January 7th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Tilapia has a really distinctive flavor, and it’s pretty strong as flaky white fish go. I can happily eat it with just a little butter, very unlike catfish. And its thinness makes for pretty easy cooking; I discovered it in my college dining hall, where it was curious resistant to ruining.
As for what to do with it, this is pretty good and dead easy: http://www.pastemob.org/wp/?p=1233
(Applying the paste anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes into the 15-minute cooking time turns out to work. The flavor is sharper the less it cooks.)
January 8th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
My dad had a tilapia kick when he went on the Atkins diet, though I don’t know anything about its nutritional qualities. I do know that it eats the poo of striped bass. I learned this from Dirty Jobs: Mike Rowe goes to a fish farm, where he discovers that tilapia are used to keep the striped bass’ tanks clean. It’s not a terribly discriminate eater, apparently. Tasty fish, though.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I like tilapia baked with a black bean/corn salsa. Yummy.
Also, as previously stated in the mentioned convestion, I love catfish. Not as food (not that I dislike them as food), but as fish. Catfish are pretty damn awesome.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I think tilapia makes pretty tasty ceviche, though I’ve probably given myself massive intestinal distress over it…