The Seafood Handbook has more than 280 pages, all in full-color, shiny stock and spiral-bound. The first few chapters are devoted to issues on sustainability, health and safety, aquaculture, harvesting, distribution, product forms, and preparation. Much of the book is for the profiles of the finfish and shellfish. Each species takes up a two-page spread, which has a large painting of the species, a few descriptive paragraphs, a product profile (flavor, texture, and storage), cooking tips, cooking methods, substitutions, global supply, primary product forms, and nutrition information. The book also comes with two very large posters providing overviews of the species: one for finfish and one for shellfish.
The book presents an amazing diversity of seafood -- 210 species in all. Each spread is very easy to read and presents all the pertinent data about the species in a clear and organized fashion, though some info such as market size do not consistently appear for all of them. The nutrition facts (which now include omega-3 fatty acid content), substitutions, and flavor and texture "scales" are very smart additions and make the book unique and quite interesting to read. It wouldn't be very difficult to breeze through the book and gain quite an impressive knowledge of almost all the seafood varieties offered in the market today. The best part is that the book is remarkably light and easy to handle, and shouldn't be a bother if one wishes to take it on a market excursion. Though the Seafood Handbook is quite impressive in its breadth, it is important to note that the book appears to be geared toward a mostly North American audience.
Another nearly comprehensive guide on seafood written by Alan Davidson, North Atlantic Seafood, uses line drawings to illustrate each species. It comes down to a matter of personal preference whether one prefers the detail of Davidson's discrete ink lines which better highlight anatomical nuances, or the skillful color paintings used in the Seafood Handbook.
The introductory chapters on fishing methods and product forms, including the different types of freezing and packing for shellfish, are very informative and not at all intimidating to someone only beginning to become familiar with the seafood industry. However, these also contain the most glaring shortcomings of the book. While the book doesn't promise more than a "crash course" in topics such as aquaculture, a few of the sections are very poorly written. Even though I anticipated some bias for the seafood industry as the book is written by the editors of Seafood Business magazine, I felt like they did their readers a disservice by discussing the very important issues of health, safety, and sustainability in very broad and poorly explained statements. They should have assumed that people who buy the book already have a keen interest in seafood; they needed to have written about the concerns of the consumer even more, rather than downplaying them. It reads like a Powerpoint presentation in which the bullet points have been passed off as paragraphs. Some statements, especially those about the health risks of seafood, are dismissive and give incomplete pictures.
The book takes baby steps into the subject of sustainability, recognizing that it is an important concept to consumers. However, for some species of concern or controversy, such as cod, there isn't even a mention of conservation issues in the profile. Perhaps adding the current state of sustainability and qualifying it. Though this may be problematic for farmed species because of a lack of existing standards, at least laying down the facts is a step in the right direction.Get more detail about Seafood Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide to Sourcing, Buying and Preparation.
