19 December 2008

Sushi and Mercury

As mentioned in earlier posts, I have given a lot of thought to eating fish v. eating mercury. I love fish, I know that fish has a lot of things I need. And so, even though I am a well-informed consumer, I like to be temporarily bathed in a nice puddle of ignorance for those few times I indulge in something that is likely to have a high mercury content, like sushi. Which is why I don't enjoy stories like this one about how actor Jeremy Piven has been made seriously ill by his sushi (basically he OD'd, with reports of two sushi meals a day.) The article says, 

"Piven “split from the critical and commercial hit Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, citing doctors’ diagnosis that he’s suffering a high mercury count,” causing Mamet to quip that Piven quit to 'pursue a career as a thermometer.'"

This a good article, and it is a fairly high profile story, with version also appearing in the LA Times, ABC News, and other places. It will be interesting to see if it has any impact on how sushi restaurants market their fish beyond recent stories such as this one.


2 comments:

The Cunctator said...

The important thing to recognize is what's at fault -- electric utilities that use coal without using available technology to scrub the mercury.

Instead Bush put utility lobbyists in charge of the EPA process and let them pump a few more hundred tons of mercury into the air and from there into the oceans.

buttonwillowsix said...

I was going to mention that coal was specifically mentioned in that article. I really liked that, since usually fish/mercury articles handwave about exactly how the mercury got there. (And I guess I did the same thing by not mentioning it!)