On Food and Cooking

hormonal disturbances in laboratory animals,
and they accumulate in body fat. Fatty coho
salmon and trout in the Great Lakes carry
such high levels of these pollutants that
government agencies advise against eating
them.
Cooking doesn’t eliminate chemical
toxins, and there’s no direct way for
consumers to know whether fish contain
unhealthy levels of them. In general, they
concentrate in filter-feeding shellfish like
oysters, which strain suspended particles from
large volumes of water, and in large predatory
fish at the top of the food chain, which are
long-lived and eat other creatures that
accumulate toxins. In recent years, common
ocean fish have been found to contain so
much mercury that the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration advises children and pregnant
women not to eat any swordfish, shark,
tilefish, and king mackerel, and to limit their
overall fish consumption to 12 ounces/335