Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 20, 1991 TAG: 9102200123
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sure, says Virginia Tech seafood researcher George Flick.
"Fresh-frozen," in fact, can be fresher than fresh, he said, because the product was frozen at sea.
"In the past, a lot of junk was frozen," he said. And frozen food was poorly handled, making the consumer wary of the combination of the words fresh and frozen on the same package.
Fresh fish is good for six to 18 days and frozen fish for four months, Flick said.
With so many seafood products around, Flick said, "no consumer can make an intelligent choice on every product." But women have picked up on nutrition first and are turning out to be the better consumers, in his opinion.
Still, there are plenty of confusing terms in the marketplace in addition to "fresh-frozen."
Take "lite" for instance.
" `Lite' has no legal definition. I don't know what it means," Flick said. It could refer to color or calories, but it doesn't necessarily mean the product contains fewer calories than another just like it.
And some practices in the industry are confusing, too.
Take salmon trout, for instance.
A salmon trout is a rainbow trout that has been fed crab scraps. The red in the crab makes the trout red; then it gets a new name because it resembles a salmon - if you don't count size.
This is similar to the yellow chickens we see in the meat case. They get that color from the marigold extract in their feed.
Someone, somewhere, decided the consumer wanted yellow chickens "and red hot dogs," Flick said with a quizzical shrug.
But Flick said it isn't true that some scallops are actually punched-out pieces of ray and skate.
"Every scallop is a scallop," he said.
The muscles in a scallop are vertical and those in the fish would be horizontal, he explained.
Besides, rays aren't as thick as scallops, and skates have dark meat.
by CNB