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
September 16th, 2008 at 11:50 am
The headline of the Telegraph article referred to in this entry is out of context from the way the original piece was written. Danson did not “blame fish and chips” for the decline of shark populations if you actually read the piece. He was making a point that the Spurdog shark species is a UK symbol of the larger problem facing the world’s oceans as a whole: overfishing and lack of science based management of fisheries. Headlines are unfortunately too often a way to get attention, and in this case, unfortunately it was spun in the wrong direction. Ted Danson is truly passionate about this issue and would never argue what people should or shouldn’t do in their personal lives. What he is saying is - chose responsibly when you can (such as avoiding Rock Salmon”), but at the end of the day the thing that is going to make the biggest difference is being an advocate and influencing policy. Learn more about what Oceana is advocating in its shark protection work here: http://www.oceana.org/europe/what-we-do/shark-conservation/european-shark-week-2008/.
September 16th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Yeah, Ted carped at Brits for eating fish-and-chips, and then told the Telegraph that he wouldn’t give up eating fish himself.
What a hypocrite!
Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/TedDansonFish
September 16th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Read the original article from which the interview is based. Danson says that giving up fish and chips is not the answer to solving the overfishing crisis. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2964566/Actor-Ted-Danson-blames-fish-and-chips-for-shark-extinction-threat.html
September 17th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I know this is an odd thing to ask, especially since conservation is a good thing, but who really cares what a washed up second-rate actor thinks?