The coat of arms of a country is engraved
The phrase "from sea to sea"
You probably think this must be an island nation
As the second largest land area country on Earth
Canada is unlikely to be associated with an island nation
It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east
To the west is the Pacific Ocean
North of the Arctic Ocean
The world's largest coastline length
Maple leaf country is also worthy of its name
The land of seafood
The best seafood in Canada
01
{Seafood Lying Flat Grandmaster - Elephant Mussel}
"If it weren't for the humans digging me out, I would have been able to lie flat in the fine mud and sand for a hundred years" – the proverb of the life of a mussel.
Elephant clams, submerged mud clams, scientific name Pacific diving mud clams, also known as emperor clams, elegant goddess clams, is one of the largest known burrowing mud bivalves shellfish, mainly distributed in the East Coast of the United States and Canada.
It is called like a mussel because it has a long siphon that resembles an elephant trunk. But why is it so ugly that it is called the elegant goddess Ha?
The Latin name "Panopea" is the daughter of the Greek gods Thespius and Megamede in ancient Greek mythology, so the genus is also known as the goddess clam genus. The elephant mussel is "prominent" and expensive in its genus, and people have prefixed it with "elegance".
(The young elephant mussel is actually quite cute, a bit like a pistachio)
We sometimes use "turtle movement is less but long life" to "sophistry" for themselves, in order to come up with something new, the next time with friends "bragging", you can also give an example: elephant mussels never move, casually live more than 100 years old ....... According to records, the longest-lived elephant mussel found so far is 168 years old.
Elephant mussels are one of the laziest species in the world, hiding in the mud and sand from an early age, relying only on siphons to exchange substances with the outside world. More than 20 years have passed, and the double shell has grown to 15 cm in size and finally reached adulthood, at this time, its feet have been highly degraded, and in the long years that followed, it could no longer move a single bit.
Of course, the long lifespan of the elephant mussel is not because it is completely "lying flat", but its cell division and multiplication ability is strong, up to about 40-60 times. In addition, it will adapt to the natural environment to spend bad seasons with "summer sleep" and "hibernation".
In this way, being picked up by humans early and regaining life may be what elephant mussels expect, which may also be the reason why they are happy to spray water at the moment they pull out the sand.
But wild elephant mussels that live in the cold, pristine waters of Canada's Pacific coast are not so "lucky."
Canada is sparsely populated and rich in resources, and people living in that land will naturally obtain food in the simplest way, and fishing for elephant mussels is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task, requiring diving into the deep sea and digging a pit more than a meter deep with a shovel to catch it.
Coupled with the fact that they like cold food but do not have the habit of raw food, the meat of the cooked elephant mussel will become woody and hard after cooling, and the extreme delicacy of the sashimi elephant mussel is not welcomed by them. Only Canadians, who are close to the sea and are not too wealthy, occasionally catch elephant mussels as food for their hunger.
It was not until the 1970s, with the popularity of elephant mussels in the Asian market, that Canada began commercial harvesting, and anticipated the lofty "money scene" of elephant mussels.
Why is there a special love for mussel pulling in Asia?
It is more chewy than fish, softer than other shellfish, and the umami taste is more intense, so it is a great waste not to become the top sashimi ingredient. The Japanese have become the main force that has helped the elephant mussels to the center of the seafood stage.
In Asia, "what to eat and what to make up for" is not only the obsession of Chinese, like a mussel at a glance, looks like an organ of the human body, naturally many people are obsessed with it. It is no exaggeration to say that the reason why elephant mussels are so expensive is that on the one hand, the Canadian government is strictly limiting the amount of fishing to maintain the sustainability of the industry, and on the other hand, it is Chinese and the Japanese are crazy about it.
The purchase price is $15 a pound, and delivering to a Chinese restaurant is $150 a pound, which is still abroad.
From the 1980s or so, elephant mussels came to China, and the "status status" for a time surpassed that of Australian lobsters, becoming the capital of local tycoons to reflect their magnanimity, and anyone who could put a plate of elephant mussel tattoos on the table was a proper rich man.
To this day, the annual commercial catch of the Canadian elephant mussel is only about 1600 tons. 80% will be exported abroad, mainly to Asia, and 89% of China's elephant mussels come from Canada.
02
{Seafood named after "name" - Arctic shellfish}
"Ingredients are raw" is most people's cognition of sashimi, tuna sashimi, salmon sashimi, bonito sashimi, etc., are all fresh ingredients, and the color is bright red.
Arctic shellfish are a different kind of existence, and they mix into the sashimi world as a cooked food. And what's even more special is that the Arctic shellfish of the sashimi platter, red is not its original color.
The Chinese of the "Arctic shell" is called the Mactromeris polynyma, which is mainly distributed along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, the North Pacific and the North Atlantic Ocean, and Canada produces 90% of the world's wild Arctic shellfish.
Canadian Arctic shellfish usually inhabit the icy seabed of about 50 meters, with a cold water temperature of 0 to 5 degrees Celsius all year round, making it take 12 to 15 years to grow to about 15 cm.
Arctic shellfish will die quickly after being caught out of the water, and if they need to be preserved, they must be quickly boiled and processed, so that the original gray-black appearance becomes bright red. Therefore, the Arctic bayonet body is basically cooked food, which is why the Arctic shellfish we eat are red.
In fact, the "Arctic shellfish" we usually talk about include "Arctic shellfish" from Canada and "Northern Shellfish" from Japan.
Both "Northern Shellfish" and "Arctic Shellfish" belong to the Family Mace clams of the order Curtain Clam, and are more closely related, and the two are more similar in appearance and taste.
The Chinese name of "Kitajima" is Sakhalin Island Macko Clam, which is mainly distributed in northern Japan and around the Korean Peninsula, and is rarely produced, and in the Hokkaido region of Japan when it was popular to eat Kitaji shellfish in the 1970s, it was one of the most expensive seafood.
The "Arctic shellfish" living around Canada is caught in large quantities by local fishermen because the government restricts the catch of major fish such as cod, and because the locals do not want it, the price is very low.
Japanese merchants, of course, did not miss such an opportunity, and by the end of the 1980s they brought Arctic shellfish to the Japanese market, and named it "Arctic Shell" based on Arctic aquatic products, at which point Stympson clams had the name "Arctic Shell" today.
However, at that time, the name "Arctic Shell" was not bought by the Japanese, and the merchants used the name of the Arctic shellfish produced in Canada to "disguise" again, and used the name of "North Shell" which has the highest status in the hearts of the Japanese, and then began to spread throughout Asia.
Such a story, in China, has come to a reversal, as the "North Shell" into China's Canadian Arctic shellfish, in China to rediscover the name that should belong to it. "North shellfish" for Chinese has no special meaning, and the word appears on seafood products, the most reminiscent of "parasite", obviously "seafood in the Arctic region, pure and pollution-free" is more attractive, so they changed the "north shellfish" back to the Arctic shellfish, it also began to explode in the Chinese market with the renaming of the Arctic shellfish.
03
{Seafood that influenced the development of the world - Canadian cod}
Elephant mussels and Arctic shellfish are not the seafood that Canadians love to eat, as a seafood power, what is their favorite seafood - cod
Cod refers to the cod genus, which is divided into Atlantic cod, Greenland cod and Pacific cod, and is one of the largest annual fish in the world. As an ancient and magical species, cod evolved into what it is today during the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs dominated more than 100 million years ago.
Social cod, used to move forward close to the seabed, throughout the journey, they will open their mouths and keep eating, no kind of marine life dares to provoke the barock that is crushing in the gossip array. They are like marching ants, leaving no grass where they pass.
Atlantic cod still maintains its original habits and runs amok on the seabed.
Greenland's best cod has an antifreeze protein in its body that allows it to survive in ice water. Once salvaged, the protein will fail and the whole fish will freeze immediately.
Before the 20th century, the number of Canadian cod can only be described by the word horror, and the newfoundland fishery, the world's four largest fisheries, once had a nickname: the place where you can step on the back of the cod and go ashore.
Until they encountered their first predator, humans, the number of cod began to decrease sharply.
Cod became an ingredient for humans, dating back to the eighth century, when cod became the main catch species of the Vikings, and National Geographic once listed cod as the first animal affecting human development.
The story of cod recorded in "Cod Past":
In the Middle Ages, in the north of Spain, there was a mysterious race, the Basques. They discovered large schools of cod in North America and knew how to marinate cod so that they could maintain their nutrition without decay during the long voyages to Europe and the United States;
Medieval European churches ruled that meat should not be eaten on Fasting Days, but cold foods should be eaten.
Iftar includes fridays and Lent every week, as well as all special additions on the religious calendar. In this way, most of the year is a meat ban day. So later, fasting became a day to eat dried pickled cod, and cod almost became a symbol of religion.
In the 1480s, explorers from all over Europe began to go to sea, following the Basques in their quest to find cod fisheries.
In 1497, the King of England sent his own explorer (John Cabot) to the New World, and soon after the explorers arrived at the shoals covered with reefs and saw endless cod. So he declared that it was the territory of the King of England, the newly discovered land of Newfoundland.
If it were not for cod, Europeans might not have looked down on North America, which does not produce silver, but the rich cod fishery is undoubtedly a gold mine at sea, and in just a few decades, European countries have launched hundreds of expeditions to Newfoundland and New England.
Colonists transported dried cod to West Africa, bought slaves, and then transported them to the colonies of the West Indies to produce sugar, and the trade relationship between cod, slaves and honey was born, and the North American continent developed.
Since then, cod has become a favorite seafood for Canadians, and thus began a crazy fishing journey.
Especially in the 1950s, cod encountered a second natural enemy, mechanized trawlers.
Mechanized trawlers can catch 200 tons an hour, compared to more than 100 tons a year by a conventional fishing boat in the past.
Subsequently, the Canadian government issued a series of protective measures, but because the entire ecosystem has been severely damaged, the number of cod has been decreasing year by year under the restriction policy of fishing restrictions in the following decades.
In 1992, the Canadian government issued a ban on fishing, and to this day, the former "inexhaustible" cod is still very rare, and the Newfoundland fisheries, famous for their cod production, have now evolved into a rich source of wild Arctic shrimp.
From elephant mussels to Arctic shellfish to the ice and snow world of the Newints, Canada, surrounded by three of the earth's four oceans, has enviable rich products and polar natural scenery, and Canada may no longer be the vast and sparsely populated in our eyes, but the natural choice.
In the next issue, we will take you into the world's largest archipelagic country - Indonesia, the country with the largest number of Chinese in the world, and how much déjà vu there is in the tropical rainforest climate.