A New York Times fish mystery

Works with hoki or pollock. Wesley Loy photo

Here's a curious New York Times story that aspires to solve the "eternal mystery" of what goes into a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich but ultimately leaves readers seriously uniformed.

The gist of the story is about the purported overfishing of hoki off New Zealand.

Hoki is a whitefish used in the Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

Because the catch limit has dropped from 275,000 tons in 2000 to 100,000 tons last year, well, we might run short of fish sandwiches, the Times story implies.

What struck me most about the article was the lack of any mention of probably the main fish used in the Filet-O-Fish sandwich — Alaska pollock.

As with hoki, the pollock catch limit has trended down sharply in recent years. But the eastern Bering Sea continues to yield immense catches of pollock, about eight times the hoki volume cited in the Times story.

You'd think the Times wouldn't have let that fish, uh, fact get away.