The fish stared back at me, eyes wide and shining, fins limp and wet. Still half-wrapped in paper, its gut hollow, it was the first whole fish I’d brought home to cook, and it forced me to reckon not just with dinner, but with life and death.
“Culturally, we’re not a country that spends a lot of time eating whole fish. We’re not conditioned to do it; we’re a fillet-eating society,” chef Ricky Moore, who runs a seafood restaurant, tells me by phone. “Most places abroad, eating whole fish is standard, it’s normal.”
