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Seafood - Eat healthy while enjoying variety

In our schooldays, the geography teachers repeatedly told us that three-fourths of the earth's surface was covered by water. But they forgot to inform us that it is the living quarters for a lot of seafood.We have also learnt from our reading that the seafood we eatcomes from a very limited portion of this vast area. Fish, crustacean and mollusks, oysters and clams, lobsters and crabs, shrimp and scallops and mussels are all there. Added to these are the bountiful variety of fresh water fish like trout, bass, crappie and carp, perch, pike,pickerel, and chub. God made fish. Man made net and adventured on the waves. They called themselves fishermen and started gathering seafood from the ocean depths, bay bottoms, rivers, and lakes in nearly unbelievable variety. Yet there must be still fish in the deeps that man has not discovered or caught or tasted. Lucky is the consumer who buys the catch alive or fresh. Sometimes many days lapse between catch and consumption.

And the catch must be preserved by all means. Hence the catch reaches the consumer in diverse forms - whole, dressed, filleted,sliced; shredded or flaked; iced, frozen, salted or smoked; alive,pickled, cooked, raw; canned, packaged and what not . "An excellentsource of digestible proteins, fats, essential minerals (calcium,phosphorous, iron, magnesium, iodine, copper), vitamins (thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, ascorbic acid, vitamins A and D)," writes ArthurHawkins, "seafood is the most important single food available to man". Seafood comes in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, all flavours, textures and in a plethora of colours. We can eat seafood for breakfast, brunch, lunch, supper and dinner. We can eat it dried, pickled, smoked or raw. If raw, we can broil it, boil it, steam it, bakeit, poach it or fry it. Eat seafood in anyway you like for it is low in calories, high in protein. Seafood is one of the healthiest, tastiest and most versatile of foods.

P. RAJA

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