If you went to Cheers to pour a few back with Norm and Cliff, could you get a plate of fish and chips? Probably not, if Ted Danson had anything to say about it.
One of the ways that Danson has been keeping busy, now that “Cheers” and “Becker” are long since canceled, is by heading up Oceana, the ocean conservation organization he started two decades ago. Danson is hopping mad that a rare species of shark called the spiny dogfish has been hunted to the brink of extinction, and he faults, for one, the British love affair with fish and chips.
Danson says that cod formerly made up the first half of this dinner tradition, until that fish was vastly over-harvested. Now, he says, spiny dogfish in waters around the U.K. are a prime target of fisherman, and as a result dogfish numbers are down below 5 percent of their former level.
So many of our favorite foods are destructive, it seems, but even Danson isn’t going to stop eating fish and chips. Just check and make sure that the ingredients don’t include “rock salmon,” he says, which is how dogfish is marketed.
Seriously—don’t make him sick Frasier on you.
Image: flickr/Alan Light
