Fishing for Absolution

Organizing the abode and eating well. Valid goals. I am sure that you already got the news that wild salmon is well beyond the reach of most middle class Americans better for you but like me, may occasionally be unable to present a cogent argument as to why this is so.

Environmental Working Group to the rescue once again! Always buy wild salmon because it's got less mercury than farmed salmon, which is fed scary bits of other animals and/or genetically modified monocrops blecch has problematic polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs which have no safe ingestion level. For us on the East Coast, this means no salmon if you want to eat local. Alas, there is no wild Atlantic salmon anymore....

Other, more affordable good choices? I was just pondering this at the fish case yesterday when I could not for the life of me remember whether I should buy that cheap frozen multi-pack of orange roughy (hah! I knew I shouldn't get it! Not sustainably fished and high in mercury! But I had to go back and look at my November 11 post). I really will print out a wallet card that has all of the permutations I care about on it soon, but until then, repeat after me: mahi-mahi, haddock, tilapia, flounder and sole are not only low in PCBs, but mercury as well. And you can't go wrong with a can of sardines. Obviously, women who haven't had kids yet (nasty chemicals accumulate in your body and then go right into your infant when you breastfeed), pregnant/lactating women, and small children need to be especially careful about which fish they eat.

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Via Baby Toolkit awhile back, the word of the day is...

scurryfunge: a hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor coming and the time she knocks on the door. (Informal English).

Now, what might we call it if, say, a person knew that a good friend was visiting soon and, eh, decided to attend to pressing etymological matters and researching paper-making techniques rather than tidying? Even if the host in question had an unrelenting head cold?? Hmmmm? (Languorhovelling? Procrastisqualoration?)

Love this essay on gratitude, from Chris Glass, about unexpected hospitality and pleasure. Suffice it to say, that, amongst other things, the author learns about the joys of having an unwrapping "compadre." And I think he might extrapolate that togetherness trumps the downside of squalor. Wild salmon lox or no.