Essaouira
Today we visited the port city of Essaouira. There was a large fish market with open-air restaurants just a stone’s throw away. Each little business along a continuous strip displayed the catch of the day. While there was the occasional tiger moray eel or odd fish, all the restaurants were offering similar fare: mantis shrimp, squid, sole, red snapper, bream, and urchins, as pictured here. Enthusiastic owners would declare that their neighbor’s fish were old and tasteless. Indeed, it was only their offerings of all the stalls that were truly fresh, a claim they quickly backed by showing us how the gills were sweet and red.
Too early to eat, we continued to the busy docks and watched as box after box of sardines were unloaded and sold from the boats rigged for “purse seining”. Life abounds in the chilly, upwelled waters of the Moroccan coast. Close by, from the smaller boats rigged for long lining, there was a more disturbing sight, piles of beautiful blue sharks, pelagic hunters of tuna and squid who in a normal life would crisscross the Atlantic several times. Did they die for more than another pot of shark fin soup? I hope so, yet I know they’re not eagerly pursued for their sour meat. But that’s our world, light and dark side by side, one passing to the next, then back again. Not always right, not always wrong. If ignorance is the problem we can always learn and that’s exactly what we are here to do!
Today we visited the port city of Essaouira. There was a large fish market with open-air restaurants just a stone’s throw away. Each little business along a continuous strip displayed the catch of the day. While there was the occasional tiger moray eel or odd fish, all the restaurants were offering similar fare: mantis shrimp, squid, sole, red snapper, bream, and urchins, as pictured here. Enthusiastic owners would declare that their neighbor’s fish were old and tasteless. Indeed, it was only their offerings of all the stalls that were truly fresh, a claim they quickly backed by showing us how the gills were sweet and red.
Too early to eat, we continued to the busy docks and watched as box after box of sardines were unloaded and sold from the boats rigged for “purse seining”. Life abounds in the chilly, upwelled waters of the Moroccan coast. Close by, from the smaller boats rigged for long lining, there was a more disturbing sight, piles of beautiful blue sharks, pelagic hunters of tuna and squid who in a normal life would crisscross the Atlantic several times. Did they die for more than another pot of shark fin soup? I hope so, yet I know they’re not eagerly pursued for their sour meat. But that’s our world, light and dark side by side, one passing to the next, then back again. Not always right, not always wrong. If ignorance is the problem we can always learn and that’s exactly what we are here to do!
