Opinion – Cozinha Bruta: Dictatorship of tilapia is the death of gastronomy

I returned to Mercadão de São Paulo the other day for three reasons. I needed to leave the house in the morning because of the fortnightly cleaning, I wanted to buy cheese and I found it interesting to see how the movement was going after the fruit scam and the bologna scandal.

The fruit harassment still continues, but it is more contained. If you run away, they don’t run after you to give you a rear naked choke. It was Monday, so the market aisles were quiet.

I broke a left and came across a recently opened Peruvian cevicheria, which I already follow on Instagram. Great. What a magnificent idea. Ceviche at Mercado Central, where you can snub fresh fish and different fish, there are so many options.

A man who appeared to be in charge of the operation was standing there welcoming customers. Few, still, for it was noon.

He handed me the menu and, when I read the fish options available, I saw that there were only two: salmon and the so-called “white fish” (crustaceans and molluscs too).

I asked, already intuiting the answer, which would be the white fish of the day. Tilapia, the Peruvian replied. But why, if there he could have any kind of fish, the best and freshest?

Then the cevicheria owner explained to me that tilapia is the fish most similar to what is used in Peru. Hmm. In Lima, ceviche is made with fish from the Pacific ice cream, and tilapia is an aquatic chicken that grows in hydrothermal resorts.

The justification does not convince.

The reality is that very few cevicherias in Brazil, owned by Peruvians or Colombians, dare beyond tilapia. Tilapia is used because the supply is regular, the quality is uniform, it comes already filleted, it costs less than marine fish and is well accepted by Brazilian customers.

There are five good reasons. The sixth: if the aquaculture is done within the rules, you avoid the risk of buying something that could come from overfishing.

Then comes the boring thing: but what about gastronomy? If the thing is to present an exotic cuisine – in the sense of “foreign” –, how about getting really close to the real thing? A taste of the sea, perhaps? A little variety?

The tilapia dictatorship is too boring. Just like the salmon one, but I’ve already spent too much talking bad about farmed salmon.

The example of cevicheria in the market is radical, but the omnipresence of tilapia –they don’t even bother to disguise it as saint-pierre or saint-peter– destroys the diversity of lunch restaurants that lie about the “fish of the day”, Japanese flaccids who bet on white fish, from the kilometers from north to south of Brazil.

Tilapia makes things easy, it’s cheap, it doesn’t fail. Eliminate risk. Without risk, boredom remains. And boredom equals death.

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