Tygerpen: Strange fish I have known

My 26-year-old son Jordan, who’s in culinary school, patrols my kitchen ever since he took a class in food safety. He’s particularly wary of food handling when it comes to fish. Once he informed me that tapeworms can occur in freshwater fish and when ingested as larvae can, in humans, reach 30 feet, or the length of a Stegosaurus. One source of tapeworm larvae, he said, is undercooked gefilte fish.

Gefilte (“stuffed”) fish, for those unfamiliar with Jewish cooking, is often the least desirable dish at a Passover seder, not only because of the fish smell, but because it resembles an anemic potato or a “log” such as one might find floating in an unflushed public toilet.

I rarely eat fish, maybe a few times a year — an appalling statistic for someone born in the Pacific Northwest. My grandmother made gefilte fish from scratch that was actually edible and never undercooked, so I never got tapeworms. Possibly that was also because she served the gefilte fish with horseradish that in a pinch could be used to cauterize small skin lesions.

I have always enjoyed watching fish confined to aquariums, swimming freely or being eaten by seals. During a recent visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I flashed back to my grade school days and those ads in comic books that shouted “LIVE PET SEAHORSES, $1.” I never ordered them because the ads seemed too weird. Besides, how could a seahorse, assuming it survived the postal delivery process, compete with kids who owned dogs, cats and parakeets? What could I say at show and tell — “These are my pet seahorses. They’re going to die way before your pets!”?

At least the seahorses looked real. I also remember an ad for “The Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys,” which showed cartoonish humanoids, apparently naked although private parts were concealed by odd-looking fins and extremities. Judging by their smiles, they enjoyed excellent dental health. The female sea monkey wore lipstick on cosmetically enhanced lips.

Years later, I read that “The Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys” were unappealing brine shrimp that hatched within minutes after contact with water. They were pedaled by an inventor and mail-order entrepreneur named Harold von Braunhut (“brown hat”). He also invented X-Ray Spex (“See through skin! See through clothing!”), Invisible Goldfish (complete with glass bowl, invisible goldfish food and a guarantee their owners would never see them), and Crazy Crabs (pet hermit crabs).

Billions of Sea-Monkeys were sold, and apparently some of that fortune was distributed to Aryan Nations, the anti-Semitic, white supremacist group, because Mr. Braunhut, possibly from exposure to too much sea brine, was a major supporter. (He added the “von” to sound more German.) The Amazing Sea-Monkeys are unfortunately still around today, under new ownership and, despite some tinkering, still look pretty Aryan.

What is it about fish that brings out this baser part of man? Even in Florida, there is a popular fish called the Jewfish. Whose brilliant idea was this? It’s a huge fish that can grow as long as seven feet and weigh more than 800 pounds. There’s been some speculation the name was originally Jewel Fish because its scales glisten and glimmer in bright sunlight. The Monterey Bay Aquarium does not house any Jewfish because of its size, the fact it’s an Atlantic fish — and because there’s no rabbi on staff.

Fortunately, the American Fisheries Society, acting on a request from Florida officials, changed the name to “Goliath groupers.” The Monterey Bay Aquarium was not fooled by this name change. It still won’t carry the fish that, when eaten, can cause ciguatera poisoning with its notable symptom of sensory reversal — feeling hot for cold and cold for hot — that often leads undiagnosed male ciguatera victims to seek treatment from a gynecologist for menopausal symptoms.

“Goliath groupers” or not, there’s still a problem. A bridge crossed by Florida marathon runners is called Jewfish Creek Bridge. Jewfish is also the name of an unincorporated community in Monroe County, Fla., located in the upper Florida Keys on Key Largo. By some accounts, Key Largo itself was called Jewfish until 1921.

As a serious movie-goer and fish-phobe, I have to ask myself: If the town’s name had not been changed, would admirers of Humphrey Bogart really have watched him in a Florida Keys–filmed 1948 action-packed movie called “Jewfish”?

Trudi York Gardner is not a rabbi, rebbbetzin or spiritual leader. She’s not a Jew-by-Choice; her mother made her go 13 years to religious school and there was no choice. She lives in Walnut Creek and can reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or via her blog, http://www.tygerpen.wordpress.com.