We went out to Olney for an Easter Sunday dinner at my Aunt Jackie's house. And thanks to Al, who caught a huge 37-pound rockfish the day before at the opening of rockfish trophy season in the Chesapeake Bay, we had a delicious fillet for our main course. Al's fish, which was nearly the length of Jackie's kitchen table, was not even the biggest catch of the day, a fact that made me a little confused and in need of oxygen. I was so disoriented by the sheer size of the fish, in fact, that I forgot to snap a picture of it before Al sliced it up into two colossal fillets. We only cooked one of the fillets (the other was stored for later) and it comfortably fed all six of us.

Now I hate to ruin the vibe, but I have to digress on the undercurrent story here (pun intended), which is the one that the media has taken hold of and that you'll find if you do any kind of Google search for "fish" and "Chesapeake Bay." And it is this: bay rockfish and bass have been known to carry a disease called Mycobacteriosis. Our fish didn't have any legions and neither did any of the fish caught by the people featured in the WP article I link to above. One reason is probably because it is spawning season and most of the large fish in the bay right now are fresh from the Atlantic. But there is now doubt as to the reality of the Mycobacteriosis problem, and of course the fear caused by the media hype over this has had a huge impact on fishing in the bay. According to the WP article above, charter boats are not filling up, and the price paid at the docs for rockfish has dropped from $2.50 per pound to $1.50, despite the fact that there is no evidence that the disease could actually be spread via cooked meat. But let's be real: facts have nothing to do with it. If I had my choice of eating a legion-filled rockfish or not, I'd go with not.

There was a good commentary on NPR's All Things Considered recently by Terry Smith. It was about the deceiving beauty of the Chesapeake Bay and how underneath all that beauty is a wealth of health problems. According to the story, "vast stretches [of the Chesapeake] are 'dead-zones' where there is not enough oxygen to support life." Indeed, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which rates the health of the bay each year on a scale of 1 to 100 has given a score of 27 for the past two years.

It makes you wonder: will all fish be unsafe to eat someday? Right now we have major problems in water channels near our major cities, (San Francisco, New York, Baltimore) but what about other bodies of water? What about freshwater fish? I've been to some lakes in Texas that made me wonder. Doesn't it seem like we're running out of 'clean' water?

There was an interview I heard recently on NPR of author Mark Kurlansky. He wrote a book about the New York Oyster business, a business which is now pretty much extinct, but was once a vital component of the city. The book is called 'The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.' Sometime in the 1920's the oyster business disappeared, largely because New York oysters 'fresh from the Hudson' (a glaring oxymoron today) became remarkably unsafe to ingest. Mmmm. . .

Knowing all the information about the Chesapeake Bay makes this weekend's feast seem like more of an act of bravery than of culinary delight. But at least we know where the fish came from and how it was handled between the catching and the eating. The bottom line is this: who knows if we're ever really safe with anything we eat. Eating oysters from the Hudson: that's unmistakably a bad idea today. But eating fish from the Chesapeake: that still seems relatively safe. You just have to use common sense. I guess we can't think about it too much.

All I know is the fish I had this weekend was one of the best I've ever had! Thanks, Al!

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