| BY MARK COATNEY
First
of all, for the Catfish Museum in beautiful downtown Belzoni,
Miss., a suggestion: More catfish. This is hard for me to
say, because it's a very nice-looking building, and the
man was very kind, and there were T-shirts — all kinds
of catfish T-shirts — and aprons, and oh, those hats!
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| DIANA
WALKER FOR TIME |
| A
Mississippi fisherman holds the championship
fish missing from the Catfish Museum
in Belzoni |
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But there
weren't too many actual fish, you know, and that's what
I was after. Championship fish. Trophy fish. Photos of six-foot,
228-pound channel cats. Essays on the impact of fried catfish
on the Catholic Church. Or at least, you know, some, um,
free food. It's like taking the Budweiser brewery tour and
not getting the sample glass.
Other
than that, Mrs. Lincoln, it was cat-tastic. Belzoni sits
square in the middle of Mississippi's catfish country. Virtually
any catfish you buy is farm-raised, and more than 60 percent
of the farm-raised catfish in the U.S. are raised within
50 miles of here. A lot of old cotton fields here have been
bulldozed into square, five-foot-deep ponds where millions
of catfish are raised from fingerling to finger-licking
in 26-month cycles.
We visit
the Delta Pride catfish processing plant outside of Indianola,
where 1.5 million pounds of fish are briskly "dispatched"
every week. Delta Pride is in a co-op arrangement with local
farmers who bring in their fish in 10,000-fish lots for
processing. Before that happens, though, they have to get
past the tasters. The tasters are two people with highly
developed senses of taste and smell who spend every single
working day chewing and then spitting out small representative
sample bits of microwaved catfish. Farm-raised catfish aren't
supposed to have any odor, or taste fishy, and the plant
will take only those that match that description. The tasters
have the palates of wine tasters, and their vocabulary is
much the same — a fish can be rejected for tasting
too woody, for instance, and then the whole batch that the
fish came from is sent back to the catfish pond for a few
weeks in hopes that the taste will improve.
Today,
we are lucky enough to be present when the tasters hand
out a BG-5, which stands for blue-green algae 5 and is their
worst rating. The catfish from this farmer are heading back
to the pond for at least a month in hopes that the delicate
combination of soil, water and sunlight will be more favorable
to the fish this time around. Sometimes farmers will add
copper sulfate to the pond to help control the algae, or
they will even take the fish to another processing plant
to try to get a more favorable ruling.
Looking
to the future, the boys down in R&D are working on other
uses: Bakeable catfish, say, or catfish sticks (which was
our suggestion). More grist for exhibits in the future,
expanded version of the Catfish Museum.
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