Seafood: Taiwan's Undersea Treasure

The Lunar New Year holiday is com-ing, and a whole fish-symbolizing "bounty"-is an indispensable part of the feast. Shrimp and shellfish help make up a seafood hot pot. Also on the table is mullet roe; produced in winter, the eggs are now at their freshest. After the New Year's Eve meal, taking advantage of the holiday, there is a rare chance to get the whole family together for a leisurely drive along the Northeast Coast. Seafood beckons along the whole route, from Pisha fishing port (near Keelung) and Aoti in Taipei County to Peikuan and Kengfang in Ilan, and on to Nanfang'ao.

Sources of Taiwan's Seafood Source: Taiwan Fisheries Bureau／Graph by Lee Su-ling.

Open up a book of Taiwan seafood recipes or maps of Taiwan fishing grounds, and you will find crimson crab from Penghu, mackerel from Nanfang'ao, milkfish from Tainan, and sashimi from Tungkang. At high-grade banquets there's everything you can imagine, from Norwegian salmon and Thai shrimp to French raw oysters and Japanese-style "ice fish." No wonder seafood gourmands declare that this is the best of times for seafood-lovers.

Thanks to aquaculture, oysters are now big, fat and abundant. However, because of river pollution, in recent years oyster banks have had to be moved ever farther out to sea. （photo by Diago Chiu）

How is it that seafood has proven to be so popular in Taiwan?

When it comes to seafood, Taiwan, surrounded by water on all sides, has great natural advantages. Seafood is ubiquitous in daily life-from the banquet table and the family dining table to snack food, games, and language.

Squid used to be an import for Taiwan, but now is an export. With the development of the fishing industry, Taiwan's squid catch is now third in the world, and squid, which used to be considered a valuable gift, has become commonplace in night markets and cheap eateries. （photo by Diago Chiu）

Friends talking on a winter night bring out some mullet. After carefully pairing away the thin membrane, they wash the mullet roe in rice wine to eliminate the pungent odor. The fragrant and chewy orange-yellow eggs, roasted slowly over a fire and paired with leeks, go great with beer. After the head of the mullet is steamed, the meat can be cooked with tofu, making a great dish for older people or small children who have no teeth. Mullet fat, cooked in sesame oil, can be given to women who have recently given birth as a tonic to restore their strength. The meat can also be cooked with cabbage in a rice-noodle soup. The mullet maw, meanwhile, is delicious fried in soy sauce, among other uses. And be sure not to throw way the fatty drippings-they taste great poured over rice.Past repasts

In a time when meat was difficult to get, housewives along the coast used sea turtle instead of pork. Children opening their lunch boxes often found that they all had bandfish. When the lizard fish came out in force, every household bought ten or so, and, adding sugar and soy sauce, slowly fried them to make dried shredded fish. Children, with their clear eyesight and dextrous hands, were usually given the work of removing the fish bones.

When it came to snack food, there were no McDonald's, but along the coast street vendors sold three small crabs stacked together, and even lent you a small stool so you could gaze out to sea as you chewed. The leftover shells could be used to play ang-a-biao (a children's game of flipping shells onto one another). At the movie theater, long before there was popcorn, you could buy snails prepared with soy sauce, garlic, and hot pepper, sold cheaply in little paper packages made from pages torn out of telephone books.

If you had no money to buy seafood, you could catch it yourself. Children along the West Coast of Taiwan searched the flat sandy beaches near the mouths of rivers for the telltale sign of a buried clam-two little mouth tubes sticking out-which they dug up by hand. Women and children along the Northeast Coast took advantage of low tide to seek top-shells.

When the stock market was booming, people in Taiwan splurged for seafood meals costing up to NT$100,000. Such dinners had to have the "four seafood golden platters": shark fin, abalone, lobster, and jiukong （small abalone）. （photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang）

There are also many connections between language and seafood. The sunfish, considered a delicacy in seafood restaurants, used to be called xinfuti (crying bride). This fish, with soft white meat and a high water content, was so named for the same reason that a certain green vegetable (Chrysanthemum coronarium) is called "wife beating vegetable": Both of them shrivel up, losing water rapidly, as soon as "the heat" is applied. Meanwhile, overweight people can be ridiculed as chuanziyu (a kind of tuna with an enormous round body and a tiny head).Taiwan roe.... eggcellent!

Taiwanese have been eating mullet and milkfish for 300-400 years. These have already become part of the culture. Nevertheless, mainland Chinese connoisseur Tang Lu-sun only discovered how delicious mullet roe is after he came to Taiwan.

The quality and variety of seafood in Taiwan is a result of Taiwan's unique natural advantages.

The distribution of fish species depends mainly upon coastal topography and geology, currents and water temperature. Taiwan's coastline is 1,600 kilometers long, with complex and varied geology. The West Coast is mainly sandy-bottomed, shallow, and with moderate gradients and broad tidal belts. So there is a rich variety of shellfish available. At river mouths, where salty and fresh water mix, there are ample nutrients from the upstream parts of the rivers as well as from the sea to support a large amount of sea life. Yet there are relatively few predators. Thus these are places where the young of sea creatures-such as the eel-congregate.

Taiwan is located at the crossing point between the cold water continental current and the warm water Kuroshio current. It is an undersea crossroads for an abundant variety of sea creatures. This gives Taiwan several hundred varieties of economically useful fish, more than 30 of invertebrates, 400-plus of shrimp and 600 or so of crabs. No wonder Tang Lu-sun says that the variety of seafood available in Taiwan is a match for Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong combined.

In fishing ports, seafood is simply an intimate part of life.

The mullet, a representative variety, comes to Taiwan every year along with the northeast seasonal winds. Mullet which have grown to adulthood in rivers along the coast of mainland China put to sea to form schools and mate. At the same time they start to follow the 18 to 22￠X C isotherms southward from Japan to Taiwan. These long distance "national team" swimmers arrive in the seas outside of the fishing port of Hsingta in Tainan right around the winter solstice. This is the period of their full maturity. In the calm seas around Taiwan, in the warm waters at 40 meters and below, they lay their eggs, which produce fast-growing fry. With its unique combination of ocean currents, seasonal winds, and topography, Taiwan has been renowned as a place to catch mullet since the Ming dynasty.Mullet over

Taiwan's seafood is indeed a match for the four above-mentioned provinces of China, in technique as well as variety. This is because Taiwan's seafood cuisine, strongly influenced for a time by Japanese culture, also began to absorb the influence of mainland Chinese cooking after the Nationalist government came to Taiwan.

Although Taiwan is surrounded by ocean on all sides, today's situation, in which it is convenient and common to enjoy seafood feasts, is something that has only come about over the last thirty years or so. This development has been due to advances in catching, cultivation, cold storage, and transport of fish. The story of modern Taiwan seafood cuisine begins in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan.

Chuang Ta-te, originally a fish dealer in Kaohsiung, opened a restaurant called Hai Pa Wang in 1973. This was the prelude to a boom in local seafood cuisine in Taiwan. As for why Chuang opened the restaurant at that time, Hu Kun-shan, assistant general manager at Hai Pa Wang, states: "On the one hand, of course, Kaohsiung is a seaport, so seafood is a natural. But even more important is that at that time the shipbreaking industry was flourishing in Kaohsiung, and it attracted a lot of labor from outside the city, especially from Penghu, whose natives are big seafood eaters."

Many established old seafood restaurants got their start in this period. The seafood restaurants at that time had no menus-you just had to see what the catch was for that day. The options consisted mainly of seafood captured near the coast of Taiwan.

Since then, seafood consumption has continued to grow, with seafood gaining popularity at weddings and other celebrations, and live fish restaurants popping up in every night market. The background to these developments included the general economic takeoff, a sharp rise in the number of fishing ships, improvements in fishing technology, and the burgeoning of the aquaculture industry.

In 1961, Taiwan had no more then 1000 or so motorized fishing vessels, and the annual seafood take was only about 300,000 metric tons. By 1984, the catch had surpassed one million metric tons. Today, Taiwan has more than 13,000 fishing vessels large and small, and annual production of seafood is in excess of 1.3 million metric tons.

Though there's plenty of milkfish raised in aquaculture ponds, there is less and less seafood being caught off the coast of Taiwan, and for unusual items you just have to get lucky.

Not only have fishing vessels increased in number, but large-scale fishing boats have greatly strengthened the ability to catch fish on the distant high seas. For example, the most effective type of net, the purse seine, began to be used in 1982, and by 1991 there were already 44 ships using it to catch bonito, tuna, and other migratory fish. People began to widely consume canned tuna, tuna salad, and tuna rice rolls (fantuan). In the early years, Taiwan had to import most of its squid from Korea. But Taiwan began to develop squid hook technology in the 1970s, and today, Taiwan's squid catch has reached 210,000 metric tons. Squid caught by Taiwan boats is now sold overseas, and street vendors everywhere sell squid stew and barbecued squid. In addition, it is dried to make shredded squid strips, which are a delight for travelers and hikers.Stinking head and rotten guts

A Taiwanese expression describes a person whose bad reputation reaches far and wide as "a dead shrimp or a living king crab-you can smell the stink even before they're cooked." This expression is in fact well-founded. Fish have far more amino acids than chickens, cattle, or pigs. This is where that "fishy" taste comes from. At the same time, it is relatively easy for bacteria to become attached to the gills or digestive organs of fish. Once a fish dies, the enzymes quickly begin to decompose the flesh, allowing the bacteria to flourish.

"In the past when choosing fish, people first squeezed the belly, to see if any rotten juices flowed out and whether the meat was still resilient. Today you won't find any spoiled fish on the market, and the only thing you need to look for is the brightness of their eyes, to see whether they have been frozen or caught on the spot," says Kao Kung-hsi, who works in the Fisheries Technology Division of the Taiwan Fisheries Bureau, and who is known as "the master chef" among his colleagues for his skill in preparing seafood.

In the era preceding effective refrigeration, mackerel, bonito, and other fish caught off the Northeast Coast had to be salted. Otherwise, they would spoil if they had to sit around waiting for a fish buyer to take them by train to Taipei. That is why Taipei people, who were accustomed to eating bottom-dwelling white-meat fish from the West Coast, always thought that the red-meat migratory fish from the East Coast were poisonous. They described them with slanderous expressions like "stinking head and rotten guts."

Though there's plenty of milkfish raised in aquaculture ponds, there is less and less seafood being caught off the coast of Taiwan, and for unusual items you just have to get lucky.

Take for example the ray (also known as the nautilus). Lee Kuo-tien, dean of academic affairs at National Taiwan Ocean University, recalls that when he was studying at NTOU in the 1970s, the ray that restaurants frequently offered was considered "garbage fish." Because it was never fresh, it always had a uriny smell. Today, "three-cup ray fish" is a popular dish in restaurants and is always fresh and delicious. Thanks to refrigeration technology, the reputation of the ray fish has been cleared.I want 'em alive!

Refrigeration technology is even more important for sashimi, for which the fish must be especially fresh. Today there are super-low-temperature rapid-freezing fishing vessels, whose holds are at temperatures of -40 degrees C. At that temperature, the cells of tuna caught on the high seas remain intact. Except for some especially finicky sashimi connoisseurs, most people simply cannot tell that the tuna they have today has been dead for over a week.

Taiwan possesses one-fifth of the world's 1,400-plus super-low-temperature ships. The Tungkang fishing association, located at the southern tip of Taiwan, which claims membership of many of these ships, has even set up its own specialty seafood shop in Taipei. Their super-low-temperature high-speed freezing has made their sashimi popular with Japanese restaurants, and it is also widely available in supermarkets.

Though there's plenty of milkfish raised in aquaculture ponds, there is less and less seafood being caught off the coast of Taiwan, and for unusual items you just have to get lucky.

Yet "as good as fresh-caught" is not enough for many seafood lovers today; they want a fish that is still alive at the moment they order it. In seafood restaurants, lobsters, grouper and other fish bob around in glass tanks. In 1992, Chung-Hwa Bio-Tech Aquaculture Inc., the leader in Taiwan's live-fish industry, successfully developed an "indoor high-density biological filtering system." Not only did this eliminate the arduous task of changing sea water in the aquariums, it made for optimum water quality. These days, Chung-Hwa Bio-Tech's "Hi-Q" live fish market, located in Tienmu in Taipei City, sells over five metric tons of high-quality live fish per year.Fish stocks

Now that people are no longer satisfied just having a full belly, they have begun to be more concerned about healthy eating. The taurine in fish is indispensable for human brains and eyes. The unsaturated fatty acid can lower the cholesterol level in the human body. Thus fish is healthy as well as tasty. Business people have produced ever more offerings to take advantage of this marketing opportunity.

In restaurants in Tungkang, center of Taiwan's tuna industry, the eyes of the big-eyed tuna, formerly discarded as useless, are now deemed big attractions. These eyes, each nearly 10 cm in diameter, cooked up with some sour cabbage, are promoted by restaurant owners as being rich in DHA, which they say "makes your head healthy and strong!"

In the mid-1980s, when Taiwan's stock market started a climb that would carry it through the 10,000 barrier, seafood hooked onto the economic helicopter and extravagant seafood dining became all the rage. Hsu Tang-jen, general manager of the Tau Tau Restaurant, recalls: "The more expensive something was, the more people ordered. It was common to have dinners that cost NT$80,000 or $100,000. For holidays, people had to reserve three months in advance." Back then, a proper seafood layout could not do without the "four golden platters"-lobster, abalone, shark fin, and jiukong (small abalone). Abalone, weighing in at six per catty, cost more than NT$10,000 each.

The Tainan Tan-tsu-mien restaurant, legendary in the Snake Alley night market, sold at least 100 bowls per day of its shark fin soup costing NT$2000 per. Sashimi made from the maw of bluefin tuna cost 300 NT per slice. Up-market restaurants, whose showcase items included Hong Kong- and Thai-style shark fin and lobster, were at their peak of popularity, and had a significant impact on techniques for seafood preparation.

Taiwanese have always loved scallops （above） and lobster （left）, but these markets are now completely dominated by imports. The photo shows three lobsters of different national origins.

With the fall of the stock market, half of these expensive restaurants closed. Yet, even with less money, people still craved seafood. To satisfy this hunger, sheet-metal-roofed cheap seafood places sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain, especially in the satellite cities around the main metropolitan areas. Roadside fish wholesalers and fish supermarkets as well as chain seafood restaurants emphasized their accessible prices. Colorful posters proclaimed: "Live fish: 3 for NT$100" or "Crabs NT$100 each." And even: "Lobster and spotted grouper for only one dollar!"Swan into duckling

Thus evolved seafood dining in Taiwan, from simple roadside stands by the harbors to specialty shops to the "Warring States Period" pitting high-class restaurants against cheap chain shops against fresh fish street vendors. Meanwhile, because seafood raised in aquaculture ponds or imported from abroad has steadily replaced local seafood caught near the shores of Taiwan, the "most-favored fish" lists-especially for wedding banquet dishes-have seen some radical changes of fortune.

A fish dealer named Tsai, who has been going crazy lately as the wholesale price of milkfish has plummeted to about NT$28, says with exasperation: "Milkfish used to be a very expensive item, which people only got when recovering from an operation or after having a baby. Twenty years ago [when prices in Taiwan were generally much lower], one catty cost NT$60!"

The raising of milkfish in Taiwan can be traced back to the late Ming dynasty, during the earliest days of Han Chinese development of Taiwan. But overproduction is very recent-a result of the development of deep water aquaculture around 1980. Aquaculture ponds, which had previously been about half a meter deep, could be made two to three meters deep. This raised the density at which fish could be raised, from about 2,000 milkfish per Chinese hectare (jia) to 10,000 in half that area. In addition, after the grass-shrimp epidemic in 1987, many shrimp breeders switched over to milkfish. Thus milkfish supply rapidly outstripped demand, and numerous processed milkfish products-like milkfish sauce, milkfish balls, and essence of milkfish-came on the market.

Other examples of seafoods that have slid from being exclusive guests in the halls of the high and mighty to being common features of the family dining room table include oysters and sea bass. In the past, people in western Taiwan had a saying that "a mother-in-law who spoils her son-in-law puts nothing on top of the rice noodles, but hides oysters underneath." You can tell that oysters must have been a rare treat indeed. Today, oysters are so commonplace that people are getting tired of eating them.

Wedding banquets in the early days featured five willow stew made with milkfish. Then came clear-steamed bass, with a small alcohol lamp underneath to keep the fish warm. After that came mudskipper stewed in a broth.

Taiwanese have always loved scallops （above） and lobster （left）, but these markets are now completely dominated by imports. The photo shows three lobsters of different national origins.

In the 1990s, spotted grouper has taken over the premier position. However, with the price of grouper having dropped from nearly 500 NT per catty to about half that, it is unknown who the next Queen of Exotic Seafood will be.Cheap goods, brand name

Perhaps no rags-to-riches story is more legendary than that of a once despised fish that has become high-grade sashimi-the "Wu-Kuo fish" (tilapia). Bonnie Sun Pan, director of the Preparatory Office of the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology and a specialist in food processing, explains how the Wu-Kuo fish changed from being an ugly duckling into a swan:

Everyone knows that the fish gets its Chinese name from the fact that two fellows by the names of Wu and Kuo first brought it into Taiwan back in 1946. But Taiwanese were put off by its appearance. It was later cross-bred with other varieties, so that it would produce exclusively male offspring (for the purpose of allowing the offspring to "concentrate on growing up"), but this didn't cure its fatal flaw-its rough appearance.

Coming to the rescue, the Taiwan Fisheries Research Institute then developed a new shiny-golden variety. Japanese were delighted and amazed, and began to use it (under a new name) for high-grade sashimi. Today you can see this type of sashimi on buffet tables in five-star hotels, with its snow white color and red markings. It's just that you might not know it's our old friend the Wu-Kuo fish.

Taiwanese have always loved scallops （above） and lobster （left）, but these markets are now completely dominated by imports. The photo shows three lobsters of different national origins.

Today most of the tuna that Japanese eat and the tilapia that Americans eat comes from Taiwan. Conversely, within the last ten years, fish recipes in Taiwan have quietly been shifting over to varieties imported from across the seas, and the value of seafood imports has roughly doubled. As Bonnie Sun Pan says, "With the development of trade in sea products, this is the era of the redistribution of world seafood."Flying fish

Take 1997 for example. In that year, Taiwanese imported 560,000 kilos of lobster, more than seven million kilos of serrated crabs, more than 1 million kilos of abalone, and more than two million kilos of scallops. Imports of salmon, priced low enough to be widely accessible, reached 12 million kilos. Lai Chung-kuang, director of purchasing for the Pin Yang Company, which is well known for importing salmon, states that because Taiwanese like large-sized salmon, Norwegian salmon raisers have changed their raising methods, and now grow their salmon for an additional three months, just to accommodate the consumer habits of Taiwanese.

Seafood importers laugh that seafood lovers don't ever need to leave the country, because first quality international seafood is "flying" over the seas to Taiwan. You can get crimson crab and abalone from Australia, lobster from Canada, shrimp caught in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and red grouper all the way from the Persian Gulf.

Each day Taiwan importers contact foreign businesses or fishing vessels by phone to inquire about the day's catch, after which they put in their orders. Shrimp and crabs are put in a low-temperature environment to put them in a state of semi-hibernation. Abalone-which in its natural environment latches onto surrounding objects-is attached to paper boards and put on airplanes, arriving at CKS International Airport the evening of the second day, and sold still alive the following day in restaurants or fish markets.

Now there is a vogue for recreational seafood dining. For the freshest live fish, the best thing is to go right to a harbor. After eating, you can buy some more to take home and share with your friends.

With the burgeoning trade in seafood products, new varieties of seafood appear so fast that you can't keep up. Taiwanese fish dealers make their presence felt every place on earth where you can find tasty seafood. For example, Taiwanese business people now completely control the sourcing of the popular geoducks which are imported from Canada; though they used to be popular in Hong Kong, demand from Taiwan for such high-grade seafood is now enormous. Each geoduck weighs more than one kilo, and can be fried up with onions and soy sauce or used for shabu-shabu. Another recent import is the "ice fish," the new darling of Japanese restaurants. "Ice fish" come from the waters around Antarctica, where they have feasted on pollution-free Antarctic shrimp. The meat is tender and juicy, and has a slight aroma of shrimp.Recreational seafood

These days people in large urban areas can get anything. Nevertheless, Lin Ming-yu, a senior reporter who specializes in seafood cuisine, feels that "there is nothing special about eating seafood in Taipei. It's not that the seafood isn't fresh, is just that it's nothing like going to a port and having that great feeling of inhaling the salt air and gazing out over the ocean as you eat."

Currently the Taiwan Fisheries Bureau is actively promoting recreational seafood consumption, for two reasons: For one thing, the new two-day weekend has brought with it greater demand for leisure alternatives. For another, after Taiwan enters the World Trade Organization, the coastal fishing industry will face competition from tariff-free imports. Thus the TFB has established seafood direct-sales centers in a number of fishing ports in the north and west of Taiwan.

The port of Pisha (near Keelung) was originally abandoned because the high winds and waves made it difficult to dock boats. But today, it is crowded with visitors. The direct-sales center, which opened last February, is divided into a fresh fish area and a food preparation area. In the fresh fish area, aquariums filled with live fish are arranged like a staircase front to back, attracting seafood lovers to stop and buy. Over in the food preparation area, vendors will-for a fixed price of NT$150 per plate and in less than ten minutes-turn the fish that you had just bought into a custom-cooked meal on your table. The boss at one of the stands says that on holidays there are so many visitors that she can make NT$30,000 per day.

By going to the coast for seafood, not only can you enjoy sea breezes and ocean scenery, you can also find many unusual local products which, because of their small production volume, are difficult to find anywhere outside the area in which they are produced.

Selected Seafood in Taiwan Data collated by Tsai Wen-ting／graphic by Lee Su-ling.

The gourmand Lin Ming-yu gives his highest recommendation to the Northeast Coast. As he sees it, the Northeast Coast has coral reefs and good harbors, as well as river mouths and sand beaches, so it is home to all the types of seafood that you can find on both the East and the West coasts. In addition, when the northeast seasonal winds blow, strong currents and crashing waves keep the sea water cleaner than on the West Coast. In addition, the temperature of the water is lower than off the southern tip of Taiwan, so the fish grow especially firm and plump, and taste sweeter.Cinderella stories

Despite all this, it is undeniable that the few fish caught in the waters off of Taiwan are several times more expensive than fish raised in aquaculture ponds or imported from abroad. Indeed, many products allegedly freshly caught or at least locally caught are actually imported.

Over the last decade, the coastal fishing catch in Taiwan has steadily declined. "In particular, bottom-dwelling fish, which have the most economic value and are most popular, have been the earliest to be exhausted," says Hu Sing-hwa of the Fisheries Administration of the ROC Council of Agriculture. Sea floor tow-nets damage the ocean bottom and lead to overfishing, so the catch from tow-nets has fallen considerably. In 1971 volume was about 180 kilos per hour, while by 1991 it had fallen to 80 kilos per hour.

Pollution has also cut back on local fishing. It is because of heavy pollution in Tanshui harbor that most of the fishing boats in the town of Tanshui-which used to be crowded with people from Taipei who came for the fresh seafood-have been grounded; the Tanshui fisherman's association building has been rented out to vendors.

Yet what's rare is valued, and local fish have recently come to be seen as treasures. Many low grade fish that used to be discarded or sold on the cheap are now being served in fine seafood restaurants. These even include the particularly unpleasant looking rock fish, which never used to sell well. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of these Cinderella stories is the "tofu shark" (whale shark).

With Taiwan surrounded on all sides by water, children not only can enjoy delicious seafood, they can learn to coexist and play with the great ocean. （photo by Diago Chiu）

In the past when fishermen caught a tofu shark, they would simply slice off the valuable fins and dump the rest into sea. In recent years, in part because local tastes have been changing, soft and stringy shark meat has become increasingly popular. This growing demand, coupled with falling supply-the number of tofu shark caught in Taiwan has fallen from 50-60 per year ten years ago to less than 10 these days-has driven the price of tofu shark from a few thousand per head to NT$200,000 for a single medium-sized one.Net loss?

In the fishing town of Putai in Chiayi County, clams raised in aquaculture ponds-dark gray in color and covered with mud and algae-sell for NT$50 per catty. Meanwhile, clams gathered from the open sea, in a variety of colors and with glossy, shiny shells, sell for nearly NT$200 per catty.

Is seafood caught off the shores of Taiwan really that good? Mrs. Hung, who grew up in Tanshui and runs a seafood restaurant, nostalgically recalls eating chouduyu (a siganid) caught at the mouth of the Tanshui River. She says: "Natural chouduyu didn't even need salt, it tasted fragrant and sweet just fried up straight. If you buy chouduyu that was raised in an aquaculture pond, you have to add soy sauce just to cover the smell of the earth." But local fish caught in the open ocean like the chouduyu are growing scarce.

Lin Ming-yu, who has eaten just about all the local seafood varieties available throughout Taiwan, often sighs while eating: "Why is it that today you cannot get that delicious seafood they used to have in this harbor?" It may be true that today seafood comes in a huge variety from all over the world. Yet, during these best of times for seafood-lovers, gourmands still can't avoid feeling pangs of regret for a disappearing past.