I stopped eating tinned fish. Purines and gout. I do understand that anchovies make good bait though!
(If I were in Wisconsin I might eat perch or walleye if it came from a clean lake!)
“If I were in Wisconsin I might eat perch or walleye if it came from a clean lake!”
Don’t forget about our tasty, tasty Bass! ;)
I HATE cooking fish - and we still have a lot in the freezer. (Vacuum sealed) ‘Someone’ bought himself a really nice Cabela’s smoker last year using all of his Black Card Points and yet...we still have a lot of fish in the freezer!
He did bring home Halibut from Alaska last year and I doled that out like it was GOLD. Oh, My! What a lovely fish. I think it cost him about $400 for the day of chartered fishing, though. And you know what? I. Don’t. Care! It was Heaven on a plate! :)
Fish including catfish in water bodies draining off of areas like national forests, and so on, can be VERY good table fare (assuming one does not have a dietary problem), and, under 8 lbs. or so, low in contaminants.
The lake I mentioned several posts earlier, Devils Kitchen Lake, in S. IL, is quite “clean”, but does have some mercury contamination from natural sources — basically, exposed rocks. At my age, mercury unless really high in level is not much of a concern, and in the panfish it’s pretty low anyway, even @ DKL, so wifey liking the 8” bluegill works out well.
At DKL, I’d probably release catfish over 5 lbs. or so anyway, as the lake arguably could use a few more large predators - most of the bass over 14” or so get fished out, it appears. There are good numbers of small bass, 12” or so — arguably the lake could use a slot limit (no harvest of bass between 14” and 18”, perhaps. However, that might dent the trout population...
I don’t fish the rivers much for the reason you state. Luckily, we have quite a few lakes and ponds in areas that don’t get much if any nasty runoff. :-)