Musings on seafood.

The supermarket is a mini-zoo, it is. We went to purchase necessities for retreat, nick, the boy and I, and I wandered off to the raw food section, to observe some of my dead scaly friends. It wasn't an uncommon sight: Housewives and a host of other people, poking and fiddling around with the dead fishes, obviously heeding no attention to the cold dead jelly eyes staring back up at them.

These days, I have an unexplainable fascination with lobsters. I saw a couple of them today, they look like gigantic sea insects. There were also some live prawns swimming in a bubbling tank, staring at me with their black beady eyes. The way they stare at me, makes me wonder who's really the exhibit.

Eels are a slimey lot. They wriggled and slithered in a big bathtub of water, I pictured them as Ah boy's favourite unagi, and they suddenly seemed comical.

Crabs. Ah! I can't even begin to explain my ambivalent feelings towards them! I have always had a predatory attitude for them, because they are one of my favourite seafoods, (and as I say this I'm looking forward to eating one of them tomorrow en route to the retreat destination) . But looking at how they were man-handled or rather, woman-handled today made me feel a tinge of remorse and pity. Their huge brownish glory pincers were strap tight to their shells, and signs of struggle can be detected as they are picked up by human hands, examined, and then thrown back into the pile. In such a situation, their size and their strength becomes their folly, for the good ones always get cooked and eaten first. I spent a good minute staring at them, contemplating their sorry fate. But soon, the cloud cleared, and my momentous grief at their impending funeral dissipated like the wind, and the image of huge chili crabs of tomorrow began to float in my mind's eye. With that, I was forced to confront my hypocrisy, and to move on.

I saw remnants of a medusa. A tentacle of a many-legged (or many-handed?) creature, and shuddered at its raw form, having just ate a small baby one hours ago. Friends of Davy Jones, perhaps.

Seafood is such a delicacy. The fruits of the sea come in many succulent colours that entice our eyes as well as our stomachs. Yet, the fish market, albeit an upperclass supermarket, is evidence of the barbarity of nature and man. A morgue for the magnificient creatures of the sea. Here, they are ripped apart for autopsy by the pathologist, the fish-monger no doubt, but we know the cause of death alright, "acute airway occlusion" , whatever. Lets just be thankful they didn't die for nothing, for their deaths would sustain many lives of a superior, literate race, or so we rationalize.

Yet in such barbarity, I can see the wisdom of God's plan for nature that began in Genesis. I am not sure if I'm saying this because of my voracious appetite for food, as my friends would know, but surely, if it were otherwise, seafood or any food for that matter would not taste that good.

Of course, nothing on earth can be entirely objective. I am a human being, so I am biased.

If you are a fish, salmon or trout, tilapia or prawn, you would treat me as an enemy, someone to be FEARED.

Such is the law of the sea.

Its a man eat fish world.