GRIPES

[spacesailor]

Every one in town " pays for ' water ' and then pays to take it away by sewerage pipes. 

spacesailor

[onetrack]

I enjoy going through the pre-packaged "ready meals" in the supermarkets to see just how much of the stated product is in them!

 

"Chicken with Vegetables". 23% chicken and 14% vegetables - most of which is dried vegetables. What does the rest of the percentage comprise??

[facthunter]

$14 is cheap for a kilo of good protein. That's a good basis for your decision.  Nev

[nomadpete]

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

Back onto the ever-shrinking product sizes subject - we now apparently have a new term - "Shrinkflation" - where you pay more for a smaller or lighter amount of product you're purchasing.

 

I don't know how the ABS operatives figure out how we're getting rorted, just from examining retail data - they must have better systems than me, because I often go through items I've bought when I get home, and compared them to previous buys - and only then found out how I've been rorted on size or weight. This, despite carefully examining items in the shops

This process has been happening for  decades.

 

[old man emu]

14 hours ago, facthunter said:

$14 is cheap for a kilo of good protein.

While that is true - Woolies have Basa skinless fillets at $8.00 for 400 gms, which is $21.25 per kg, what gives me the gripe is that these tins of tuna, no matter which brand, advertise that they contain 425 gms of tune, when they simply do not. Those Basa fillets come in a plastic container with nothing else. You only get fish for your money, not water that is allegedly sourced from a pure natural spring, but I bet comes straight out of an Thai urban water tap.

[willedoo]

I've never been game to try Basa. I've always visualised a Vietnamese fish farm with everyone crapping in the water upstream from it. Considering a lot of those farmed fish species have all the taste of a wet sock, the benefit wouldn't be worth the risk.

 

I took a gamble recently and bought some frozen Asian fish from the supermarket. It was labelled King Snapper and was a product of Indonesia. When I opened the main sealed packet, the bad smell was a bit overpowering despite each individual fillet being vacuum sealed. It was a very similar smell to off prawns. The flesh was also an unappealing dirty brown colour. I had no intention of eating any, but as an experiment I cooked a fillet to see if the smell went away as it does when you cook shark. No such luck, it was still bad. The crow eventually ate all the fillets and he's still alive so it must have been relatively safe.

 

The only thing I can think of is that I got a bad batch. If every batch was that awful, the supermarkets would only have one-off sales and eventually would drop the product. If it always smelt like that, I couldn't imagine anyone in their right mind buying it a second time. It took a lot of scrubbing just to remove the smell from the hands after handling it.

[onetrack]

That Basa is dreadful stuff, it's river catfish, farmed by the Vietnamese in the Mekong River. You might as well eat fish out of the Ganges River.

The Mekong River has a reported, more than 400 industrial factories, releasing untreated chemical wastes into the Mekong River - and the River Catfish has an ability to absorb many toxic compounds that would kill other fish. Of course, the toxic chemicals end up in the flesh of the fish. 

 

And to add to that, the Vietnamese treat the Basa fish flesh with chemical treatments such as washing with methanol to remove the dirty brown colour of the fish flesh and by adding polyphosphate to try and improve the appearance of the flesh.

 

QUOTE: "Basa (Pangasius bocourti), which is largely grown in the Mekong delta, is found to be infested with unsafe chemical compounds, many of which are carcinogenic in nature".

 

QUOTE: "Fish imported from Vietnam - like basa - has been found to breach standards for drug residues and to contain potentially pathogenic bacteria"

 

This website shows the Vietnamese fish farms of the Mekong River. The owners of the website were not impressed.

 

https://www.thetravellinglindfields.com/2018/04/where-does-basa-come-from-confronting.html

[nomadpete]

I have tried Basa. My corporate canteen used to sell it on Fridays. After trying it a couple of times I vowed never to eat it again. Worst tasting fish ever!

And when I found out it came from Asian fish farms, I understood  why it was so awful.

 

 

[willedoo]

The government has passed nation-wide country of origin labelling laws for seafood sold at hospitality venues. Restaurants and fish and chip shops will have to label menus with 'A' for Australian, 'I' for imported and 'M' for mixed origin.

 

https://www.delicious.com.au/food-files/news-articles/article/australian-restaurants-must-now-label-their-seafoods-country-origin/i4ffxuzt

[spacesailor]

Thanks.

I was looking at the " Bass fillits " in Aldi but I noticed it came from ' Turkey ' 

' dicanchartus labrax ' .

should I risk it , IT must be Better than our local " CARP " . Which is " CRAP .

NO joke .

spacesailor

 

[facthunter]

Carp is a member of the goldfish family and very fatty. Turkeye would be better than Mekong Mudfish.   Nev

[spacesailor]

Funny that the European's love ' carp fishing ' , even with all those bones.

Bro,in,law is ' champion carp angler ' . Even gets prizes .

spacesailor

[Jerry_Atrick]

Carp is the tradition Czech Christmas dinner..

 

Surelyi it cannot be cheaper to get the fish all the way from Vietnam to Aus than for the locals to feed the population?

[onetrack]

The Chinese have fished all the oceans surrounding Australia so thoroughly, there's bugger-all left for us. They use massive fishing fleets with motherships and process everything they catch at sea. They are the ultimate ocean rapists.

If we can get any of what's left of our local premium fish, we're paying big $$'s for it - $70 to $90 a kg. Even at that, I gladly pay the money to eat our local fish, rather than buy the Asian farmed rubbish.

The Taiwanese farm an Asian Barramundi, that's not much better than the Vietnamese Basa.

One thing that is being done to satisfy the local fish demand is farming local Barramundi at Humpty Doo in the N.T. They produce quite a satisfactory farmed fish.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Hmmm.. Isn't the coast guard supposed to protect from that sort of thing? Surely with the technology today finding fishing ships can't be that hard...

 

[Edit] I get that a lot of the fishing is technically outside territorial waters.

Edited December 3, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[nomadpete]

A lot of fishing is done within our waters by Asian groups. In Torres Strait eatly one morning we saw a sizable Indo mother ship drop a bunch of big fibreglass dories which drifted across reefs. Our pilot was a diver and he commented they are often  around, and they take up every living thing except the coral. No size or species limits.

We saw a border force twin fly under us (we were not above 500') but the illegal fishing boat was still busy when we went home late in the day.

I guess there is a lot of it happening  over in W.A.

[facthunter]

I wouldn't call a Barramundi a prize eating fish. It's often muddy tasting. Probably the crocodile's principal food up North. Ok now and again. Carp is generally 'stewed" into a crude sort of soup which some East Europeans seem to like It's rich and oily and vomit Inducing as far as I'm concerned.  It's sometimes made into a bottled fertiliser called "Charlie Carp".  It's a shame it ever got into Our Rivers . Nev

[Marty_d]

Flathead.  Prince of fish as far as I'm concerned.  Nothing better than pulling in a feed of them when they're biting too. Easy to fillet, dust in flour and dip in Tempura,  then into the oil for 2 minutes.  Magic. 

[onetrack]

We bought some Tasmanian Red-throated Emperor recently, it was very tasty. We've got a local bloke with a fish van at one of our local Markets every Saturday morning, he provides the widest range of local fish I've ever come across, and you can often choose between fresh and frozen.

[willedoo]

29 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

Flathead.  Prince of fish as far as I'm concerned.  Nothing better than pulling in a feed of them when they're biting too. Easy to fillet, dust in flour and dip in Tempura,  then into the oil for 2 minutes.  Magic. 

Flathead has always been underrated; it's one of the better eating fish in my opinion.

[facthunter]

I reckon Flathead is overpriced. There are better tasting fish. Bream, Snapper. Garfish and Long Tom filleted King George whiting (if you can handle the bones) and Lake Tailer aren't bad.  Nev

[spenaroo]

4 hours ago, nomadpete said:

A lot of fishing is done within our waters by Asian groups. In Torres Strait eatly one morning we saw a sizable Indo mother ship drop a bunch of big fibreglass dories which drifted across reefs. Our pilot was a diver and he commented they are often  around, and they take up every living thing except the coral. No size or species limits.

We saw a border force twin fly under us (we were not above 500') but the illegal fishing boat was still busy when we went home late in the day.

I guess there is a lot of it happening  over in W.A.

yeah but what do you do?
cant exactly shoot at them.
cant really lock them up either.

 

I cant see "follow us to port, we are impounding your ship and putting you on lockdown in your ship until the fines are paid" as being followed either

[willedoo]

3 minutes ago, facthunter said:

I reckon Flathead is overpriced. There are better tasting fish. Bream, Snapper. Garfish and Long Tom filleted King George whiting (if you can handle the bones) and Lake Tailer aren't bad.  Nev

Nev, you must get a different type of Bream than we get up here. The Bream here is fairly ordinary regarding taste. Not entirely tasteless, but certainly nothing to write home about. People eat them mainly because they are so common to catch in our waters.

[facthunter]

That happens. Leather jackets are good in NSW but ALL bones down here in Vic. Bream eat oysters so they must taste good. It's the weed eating fish that taste Bad. Flathead don't bite the are best caught with a live small fish and a long wire  line so it won't chew the nylon through. Flathead swim along the "sandy" bottom and often quite shallow parts of a lake. They often take the bait without you feeling it and if you pull them in gently they will come to within a few feet of the surface without struggling. One I caught i had the boat rowed a couple of KMs to get a net from neighbours so I could land it. It weighed just over 9 Lbs a good size. I have a photo  somewhere still. I was 13 years of age then and it was Kilaben Bay over near Rathmines Point where I hooked it, Nev

[willedoo]

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

I wouldn't call a Barramundi a prize eating fish.

I haven't eaten much Barramundi but would agree with that. The first time I tried it was fresh caught in the Roper River one day when we went fishing. We baked them in alfoil in the coals. I'd heard so much hype about Barramundi that I was expecting something really special. I was quite disappointed in the lack of taste, although the texture was quite good.