After reading Caitlin Moran's column in the London Times, I'm wondering whether in fact the world might indeed be divided into fish lovers (people who value fish for fishes' sake, even if they occasionally eat a few) and fish fearers (people who think we should eat them all as soon as possible).
Moran points to a pattern in the renaming of fish to either suite culinary trends or feed nightmares, and behind it all is a lesson in how ignorance breeds fear. "What goes on down there? What are they all doing? Even though lions and mosquitoes and, as we now know thanks to QI, donkeys kill millions of people a year, there's something ultimately less terrifying about them compared with fish."
i got a big kick out of a fact i read in an article about sharks a couple of years back: the worldwide average for people killed by sharks per year = 5 while the worldwide average for people killed by falling coconuts = 150. so while coconuts kill 30 times more people per year than sharks, no one is having nightmares or making movies about "killer coconuts," or calling for stringent programs of eradication of coconut palms along the world's tourist beaches. the human mind is an interesting organ indeed.
Which would you rather eat: Patagonian toothfish or Chilean Sea Bass?
I would have modified Caitlin's thesis to "we hate ugly fish". Beautiful fish have beautiful names: Trout, Salmon, Angel Fish, Dorado. Ugly fish have ugly names, until we find they taste good :)