Could anyone give me some insight on why foodies hate tilapia

More or less this. It's farmed in dicey circumstances and lacks the health benefits of wild caught fish. It's basically a mass produced cheap animal protein that barely has any fucking flavor, and less nutritional value than other choices you could make.
>It's a canvas like chicken
You could put it that way. Or you could say it's mass produced cheap flavorless shit that there's really no reason to eat in the first place. Really depends on what your standards are. Some of us won't go there, others will.

>It's a canvas like chicken

Yeah, like flavorless factory-farmed chicken. Which also sucks, just like most farmed tiliapia does.

Farmed tiliapia (which is most of it) is bland and flavorless.

There's also health concerns due to how it is raised. Often times the fish are fed literal shit--they keep chicken cages above the fish ponds and the tilapia eat the crap that falls through the cage floor.

Now wild-caught tilapia is fucking delicious. But it's a lot more expensive and very hard to find.

To sum the thread up, OP, it's delicious if cooked right but I heard it tastes bad due to the poor living conditions on Asian fish farms so it does taste bad. I'm not just a picky cunt who can't cook fish.

lobsters eat garbage too

lobsters eat whatever dead fish, etc, they can find. it may not sound appealing to a human, but at least it's a varied diet and it certainly results in a good tasting lobster.

farmed tilapia are fed literal animal feces.

think of it like chicken. Chickens will scavenge and eat whatever stuff they can find--bugs, worms, seeds, etc. Ever seen a chicken go after a mouse? It's like crack to an addict. A chicken that's free-ranged and eaten that kind of stuff will taste a lot better than a factory-farmed chicken that's been only given industrial feed.

>-they keep chicken cages above the fish ponds and the tilapia eat the crap that falls through the cage floor.

sounds like a load of chicken shit

It isn't that hard to make trash delicious. You could make a sandwich of Wonder bread and Kraft singles, the just brown it in a pan in butter and bingo! It's delicious. But it's still trash. Most of what's in our supermarkets is trash - things Pollan calls "food-like substances" instead of traditionally recognizable food. And there's reason to be suspicious of such foods, because they tend to be good at providing calories and flavor but less so at overall nutrition. People who live on a diet of such foods can be both obese and malnourished at the same time.

So some folks draw a line between foods they won't eat out of distrust. For many farmed fish and industrially raised chicken are over that line. The fact hat wild caught fish and free range heritage breed chicken are both more flavorful than their industrially farmed counterparts is a secondary argument, because it's not all that hard to make trash tasty. The point here is whether some foods are just too trashy to bother with in the first place.

google it. It's really a thing.

>because it's not all that hard to make trash tasty.

No, it's not hard to make trash tasty. But it's still never as tasty as what you could achieve when starting with good ingredients.

True. The real issue is that many folks just don't care. They'll eat anything cheap that's reasonably tasty and inoffensive. (A walk through a supermarket or trip to a chain restaurant proves this). And once you're used to a diet of trash real food with actual flavor tastes strange.If you're used to your proteins being flavorless canvases proteins with actual flavor might put you off - fish that actually tastes like fish or chicken that tastes like chicken might seem too fishy or gamey You know, if flavor comes from condiments you don't need (or even want) flavorful ingredients.

>Wild caught talipia is delicious

We have tilapia growing wild in a large spring on my families property

It tastes so bad that when we told the starving neighboring they could come get it for free to help reduce the overpopulation they only came once.

When we went to inquire if they wanted some they started making jokes about how terrible the fish tasted and how we were trying to kill off the village.

To be fair, we are used to eating ocean fish, so fresh water fish is obviously going to be bland to us.

Then what's the cheapest good quality fish?

>McFillet

>Full of rare metals

Depends entirely on where you live. Local will always be the cheapest and highest quality because it doesn't have to be transported far to get to you.

>grandma makes fried tilapia for dinner one night, she loves it
>tastes pretty good, eat 2 fillets
>later that night, sitting around watching a movie
>all of the sudden
>it feels like kimbo slice punched me directly in the gut
>try to ignore it, sip some water
>pain coming in waves
>oh fuck, im gonna puke
>run to the bathroom
>retching and dry heaving with intense force
>nothing comes out
>up there with the worst pain ive ever felt in my entire life
>ever since, the very thought of eating any kind of fish at all makes me feel ill

Grandma, meanwhile, was completely unaffected. I will never touch tilapia again. I really love eating fish, but I have yet to try any other kind since then. I can only assume I picked up some really nasty parasite.

>Yellow fin is overfished but blue fin hasn't been
>Lobster has not been overfished

Who the hell wrote this?

From food safety and environmental perspectives, it's shit because it's farmed in southeast Asia. From a culinary perspective it's shit because it's virtually tasteless and has no texture.

mackerel

Its called efficiency, and its an extremely positive thing.
The astronauts on the international space station drink their own piss. Do you hate them too?

good fish, but it has to be really fresh or pickled/smoked.

>pleasant taste

Tilapia tastes like garbage. I'd rather have salmon.

>HURR DURR, MY PREFERENCE IS THE FISH THAT'S TEN TIMES THE PRICE

Well no shit Sherlock. That's not the fucking point at all, its simply affordable lean protein for those with modest means.
I also prefer a Porsche to a Chevy, and twenty dollar bills are better than singles! Wow, I have such great taste, dont I? We are so smart, we both agree that the expensive choice is better! We should probably both get a Gold Star Award!

The one and only time I've ever had tilapia it tasted like dirt. Like, literal dirt.

The muddy taste made me not want to eat any other freshwater fish again.

I had it once and I think it still had tiny bones in it

Tofu with fins.

Eating small chewable bones is good for you. Like if you have canned salmon, eat the bones.

meh, the only salmon I find acceptable is smoked salmon

They were pretty hard. I don't know if they were bones or if I just fucked up majorly by not washing them before I cooked.

Tilapia = Chicken Breast

Does it make sense now?

I was watching a Mike Rowe show and he was at a fish farm in the USA. They took all the shit water from the good fish(don't remember what kind) and put in a tank and that's what the tilapia fed off of.

That kinda turned me off to eating tilapia but I did enjoy it before I knew it's diet.

Yep, it's an entry level protein with a mid level price

It just plain tastes like shit. Also, in third world countries it's known as low tier fish that's easy as fuck to farm, and is only eaten because it's cheap.

Local grocery store has fresh tilapia fillets for $5/lb.

Meanwhile:
London Broil is $3/lb
Chicken Thighs/Drumsticks $1/lb
Prime NY Strip is $7/lb
Pork Loin is $1.60/lb
Pork Tenderloin is $3/lb

Why would I buy trash fish at that price?

because tilapia is fucking farm raised with antibiotics and fed GMO corn and it's fucking disgusting

My tilapia is between 99 cents and 2 dollars, max.
Chicken and pork may be cheaper, but those cheap meats are shit for your health, and sometimes you simply want to add fish to your menu.
If you are paying $5 a pound for tilapia, it most likely lacks all the complaints stated in this thread. The fish is an object, it can be pristine and nice if its not grown in tainted Chinese shit-bath water. For five bucks a pound I would expect quality.

> Chicken and Pork
> Shit for health

Don't change Veeky Forums

>This fish is even worse than salmon from fish farms.
great now i'm too afraid to google what those are
but my imagination already took me to a place, where i know I won't be able to enjoy my dank Bagels with creme cheese and smoked salmon from aldi.
Thanks a lot user >:|

Cheap chicken and pork come with massive globs of fat and connective tissue. Its also full of nasty bones.
Tilapia fillets are pure protein goodness.
Thanks for the picture of a nigger. Makes more sense now that I know who's posting.

>thx for the nigger pic

Well here's a better one just for you. Now go eat your shit farmed i a vietnamese septic tank and pretend you're getting Veeky Forums, when in reality you're getting fucked. If you want a cheap safe farm raised white flesh fresh water fish, buy US farm raised catfish. Vietnamese and chinese are pure poison. You'll certainly be fit on your cancer deathbed, idiot.

Yeah but lobster doesn't taste like boiled dogshit.

>implying there's something wrong with GMO corn

>something wrong with GMO corn

There is. It's GMO.

>I would like to eat a gallon of pesticide with every piece of corn
"but I buy organic"
>I would like to eat two gallons of liquid copper with every piece of corn

Dude, it's bad. I'm sure fresh, just caught Tilapia might be good, but I've never had that, I've only had bad Tilapia.

Families who have been here long enough to have been colonists know that lobsters are beach parasites we used to feed the hired help. They'd eat it because we told them it was a delicacy. And a pleb market was born.

Tastes like shit
Lives in shit
Sold in shit stores to shit people

Their piss is purified back into potable water. Does this happen with the chickenshit? Why don't you try eating your own shit and tell us how it works out.

>Its called efficiency, and its an extremely positive thing.

I'll grant that it's efficient. But that's the problem. It focuses on cost rather than on quality. A better, more varied, diet would produce much better tasting fish.

"Efficiency" is also the reason why our supermarket poultry and meats are largely flavorless compared to the alternative.

The efficient animal that turns farm waste and shit into delicious meat is the pig. Raising fish that way is gross.

ever read something and just know its typed by a white person?

lol Tilapia is like $7 a pound in grocery stores where i live in southern Texas

not that guy but you look lame now after this second post your first one was right in line but you fell for the "Im not a Nigger" meme and now you look fucking dumb

There's nothing wrong with that. What you're doing is not being a baby and being a grownup. Gj

>grew up poor and was that fat kid
>mom made tilapia with lemon pepper
>stole lemon pepper and ate spoonfuls
>still fat fuck

except tofu is actually good for you.

Numbah one student here.

Antibiotic residue, tastes like crap, and may have other toxic substances depending on where it was farmed and under what circumstances. (China and Thailand? They probably used malachite green to kill off unwanted microorganisms in the ponds. Not to mention the polluted water laden with heavy metal compounds, herbicide- and pesticide-laden agricultural runoff, and human waste.)

What's not to love? Oh, right, everything.

Not being suspicious of cheap industrially farmed animal protein is unwise.

Because the spelling and grammar don't make it read as if it were written by a low-grade moron?

It's not just the animal protein, it's everything nowadays.

I'm an expat in Asia, and got poisoned by a local restaurant, most likely from their use of not-for-human-consumption oils.

In China it's even worse, they literally dig caked-up fat residues out of the sewers and filter them, then sell that back to restaurants.

>it's for plebs and it's bad for you because.. idk the memes says so
it's a cheap, lean, easy to prepare source of animal protein. it's excellent for what it's supposed to be. some people even like the taste, and you can flavor it however you want, but nobody claims it's the best tasting fish or anything

I live in Houston and Tilapia is $3/lb or less, you're full of shit.

>not living in Fort Worth.

Best city in Texas.

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

no