Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Eels
(Sunday NYT book review)
Eels can be raised in captivity but not bred in it. Consequently, with the related Japanese eel in serious decline, the Chinese spend a fortune to fly live young eels, or elvers, from abroad to stock their eel ponds, despite a staggering mortality rate. In the 1996-97 elver season alone, approximately 550,000 pounds of baby eels were flown to China, and only about 30 percent of the stock survived to market. These eels are mostly sold to Japan, adding still more miles to their odometers. (The European Union, concerned over depleting eel stocks, is trying to ban this trade.)
The only eel I can find is sold frozen at my local Asian market. The packaging is mostly in ideograms; it's not impossible that the eel inside was caught in North Carolina, raised in China, then shipped back here to Massachusetts. If so, it has earned a hell of a lot of frequent-flier miles.
----The rest of the book review of "CONSIDER THE EEL" by Richard Schweid is at the registration-required NYT site: [url]nytimes.com/2002/12/08/books/review/08THORNET.html?pagewanted=1[/url]
