Fat Albert food value? Forget about it

False albacore are a member of the tuna family and closely resemble several of their cousins, but they do not have the same tasty characteristics as the rest of the family, being basically inedible.

Point 1. Raleigh’s premier Japanese restaurant, Waranji, features escolar, aka white tuna, on its menu. Escolar is not a tuna and is a weird kind of fish. Its meat is 80-percent muscle and 20-percent wax that, being indigestible, runs right through digestive system in less than an hour. Eat and run? Waranji’s menu does not offer false albacore, which, presumably, is worse.

Point 2. Fishermen who have travelled to Florida are familiar with the red-meat strip baits used for sailfishing. Those strips are cut from false albacore. To use a real-estate phrase, it’s their “highest and best use.”

Point 3. False albacore isn’t found in seafood cookbooks, restaurant menus, seafood markets, supermarket freezers, and it isn’t listed in ingredients of canned cat food.

Point 4. The little white, soft lumps in the meat just under the dorsal and above the anal fin aren’t fat, but larval shark parasites.

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