Fish

From the last post, the Chicken Council's table has Americans eating about 15 pounds of seafood a year. How do I compare to that? At first I thought I'd blow it away, but on further thought, I don't think so. It's hard to really tell, since I usually buy it intermittently, but let's see: 15 pounds is 60 4 oz servings, enough for one every six days. Or an 8 oz serving every 12 days. Does that match my life?

Not as a regular thing, no; that is, if you picked a random week, I think it would likely to have had no seafood. OTOH, when I do, it's often in bigger chunks: eating 8-12 oz of home cooked salmon, pigging out dim sum (I'll guess 50% shrimp), or going on a sushi binge. I suspect if you picked a random two week period it would still more likely than not have seafood, but the ones that do might make up for that. So 15 pounds might be about right. Probably not more.

Mind you, the table number is the mean consumption. I suspect many Americans eat almost no seafood, while others have it more regularly; I might well beat the median seafood consumption.

Some source I didn't keep had shrimp as the biggest US component; I wondered if a lot of that was "surf and turf" shrimp and steak, which always seemed weird to me.

Of course, habits change. For a while I was eating canned tuna somewhat regularly, as a cheap seafood/protein source. Then canned salmon, for more fats and flavor. (Mostly straight from the can, almost as a nutritional supplement; I've never had good ideas for combining them with other foods. Yes, I know tuna salad is a thing, I grew up with it occasionally.) But more recently I'd buy salmon fillets rarely, and most often have dim sum or sushi.

And then, a few weeks ago, I decided to tackle Mediterranean/Japanese diet by brute force, and almost all the meat I've bought since then has been seafood. Mussels, frozen salmon and tuna, canned salmon and small ocean fish and clams, frozen cooked mussels (it's okay, I doubt I'll repeat that one), plus going out for sushi a lot, or having spicy seafood udon at D&D last night. If I keep it up, I'd probably eating 135 lbs of seafood a year. Pbbt!

I hope that this annoying cold/sore throat that cropped up at the same time is entirely coincidental. I mean, has to be, right?

Longitude lines

So, I've long looked at maps or globes to trace latitude lines and see what's east-west of each other, like France and Newfoundland, or Florida and northern Africa. I've done longitude much more rarely, which is how I get surprised late in life by things like South American being east of North America. Having recently moved my hand globe to the bathroom for casual perusal, I started following those lines more.

La Serena is almost exactly due south of Boston. I knew it was close, but dang. A direct flight would have been sweet. Take that, jet lag! The cheap flight I never took, stopping in Panama and Lima, would have been somewhat out of the way, though maybe no more so than Toronto. Dallas would have been quite out of the way.

The only Latin American country due south of Texas is Mexico, unless we count Easter Island for Chile. The next westernmost country is Guatemala, whose western edge is south of Louisiana.

Relatedly, Central American is very NW-SE in inclination. Arguably even WNW-ESE. Not N-S. (Also relatedly, as my father showed me, the Panama Canal is NW-SE. You go east, or SE, into the Pacific.)

Tokyo is due north of Adelaide. Beijing of Perth.

Miami is a bit west of Quito and Lima, and misses the rest of South America by a lot.

California is more or less north of Pitcairn to the west and Easter island to the east.

Hawaii is north of the Cook Islands, which feels vaguely appropriate.

New Zealand is south of Kamchatka. They even have similar inclinations.

I don't find anything surprising this way about Europe and Africa.