#four fish

You can buy between 300 and 500 different species of fish and shellfish across the USA. We smother crab legs in butter, sear Mahi-Mahi gently glazed in ginger, brew scallops into creamy soups; seafood yields us boundless opportunities. But even with all these options, 55% of seafood eaten in the US is one of three products: shrimp, salmon, or canned tuna.

Which is why the sudden addition of a fourth fish—tilapia—to our pallets in the last decade seems so dramatic. It is about as revolutionary as the expansion of our sports preferences beyond football, baseball, and basketball.

Well, kind of. Unlike every other fish in the US, tilapia has skyrocketed in popularity in the past decade. But people love to eat it precisely because it is the least fishy fish you can find. And an unfishy fish is exactly what Americans wanted.

A decade or so ago, most people had never even heard of tilapia. In fact, the World Aquaculture Society found that in 2000, Americans ate only .03 lbs of tilapia per capita per year. By 2012, we were eating 1.4 lbs a year. In a little over ten years, Americans are eating 5 times more tilapia than they used to. Tilapia had moved from an unknown fish to one that US grocery stores were selling nearly $150 a week of.

Consuming 1.4 pounds a year of something doesn’t sound like much. But, when you look at how much fish we eat every year, it’s actually pretty significant. See, Americans don’t really eat fish. In 2014, we consumed 14.6 lbs per capita. Compare that to the 53.5 pounds of beef, the 57.7 pounds of chicken, and the over 480 pounds of vegetables we grilled, fried, and roasted per capita that year. Consumption reports show that we eat two times as much cheese per capita than fish, and cheese, mind you, typically isn’t a main course (unless you’re from Wisconsin, that is).

Comparatively, our dislike for fish stands out. In the rest of the world, 2012 marked the first time that the global volume of farmed fish exceeded the global volume of beef. Asia alone accounts for over two-thirds of global fish consumption and European and Oceanic consumption has risen at a more dramatic rate than American consumption has.

Our Yankee distaste for fish was pretty constant. For nearly 80 years, Americans ate, on average, approximately 11.3 pounds of fish every year. But when the 90s hit, national concerns about fat, cholesterol, and heart disease got louder. Additionally, the worldwide sushi fad had solidly taken hold at this point and Americans started to see fish, specifically sushi, as cosmopolitan and cultured.

USDA data shows that we began to eat more meat overall but the meat we ate was leaner. We had started to substitute our Ribeyes and hotdogs for poultry and fish. By 1990 Americans were eating 15.3 pounds of fish a year. We kept on eating until 2004, where we peaked at 16.6 pounds, until dropping down to the roughly 14.3 we eat now.

Even so, Americans still didn’t like fish that was all that fishy. As Paul Greenberg, bestselling author of Four Fish put it in an interview with NPR, “whenever [industry professionals] try and figure out why it is Americans won’t eat more seafood, the three issues that come up again and again are I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t want to touch it and I don’t want to it smelling up my kitchen.” People were saying they didn’t like the ocean taste, the flaky texture, the slightly overwhelming diversity of species and recipes available—basically everything that makes fish fish. To a connoisseur, these fish characteristics are exactly what make fish exciting. But to the average American participating in a focus group, fish aren’t exciting. They’re confusing, they’re icky to touch, and somewhere, always, they leave the worry that dinner will leave a distinct odor behind. But then, there is tilapia.

Tilapia is also not exciting. It has long been known throughout the industry as “aquatic chicken” because it breeds easily and tastes bland. Genetic engineering has improved upon both of these natural tendencies to make a fish that is even more like chicken. Scientists created an industrial strain of tilapia through selective breeding—bigger fish, fleshier, with smaller heads and tails. More efficient intestines to help turn the tilapia’s already omnivorous diet into one of exclusively veggie pellets. Not too different than chicken feed.

When you have consumers who prefer chicken, and a fish that is as close to chicken as a fish can get, the next step is to let consumers know that. Tilapia producers, like Regal Springs Tilapia, took steps to do so.

In store tilapia was cut to look like chicken. Instead of selling whole fish, complete still with eyes and fins, it became more common to see hand cut fillets. Both buyers and sellers started to value better trims at the margin, for a more consistent appearance. Instead of a fish, consumers were purchasing a light pink square cut piece of meat.

istributors improved the packaging to counteract issues consumers had with fish from the start. Tilapia used to be sold in sealed plastic bags, with the shiny scales of the fish still visible, or the pink flesh squelching under the tight seal. Frankly, it did look unpleasant to touch. Distributors moved to boxes, which showed cooked tilapia—brown, on the grill, battered, or covered in spices. It looked delicious, like a full meal that probably smelled amazing. They began to put recipes on the back and side of the boxes, showing consumers that they could make all of their favorite chicken recipes using this savory new meat. If consumers didn’t know what to do with their product, distributors were going to tell them what to do with it. Namely, the exact same things Americans had been doing with chicken for years.

The determination to prove to Americans that tilapia was not a fishy fish went so far that supermarkets carried boxes which boasted of the delicious “tilapia loins” inside—even though fish have about as many loins as they do wings.