March 8 was one of the forty days of Lent, the Catholic tradition before Easter Sunday when meat is not eaten, but fish is an exception. New Trier English teacher, Patricia Gillie, went to the Whole Foods Center on Willow Road to pick up fish for dinner. She bought a cod fillet and cooked it when she got home.
After she put the cut fillet into a frying pan on the stove, she saw that the cod had some stowaways. The first thing she saw was a two-inch worm wriggling out of the fish. Despite the burning surface of the frying pan, it was still alive. There were even more moving around in the tempura breading in which she coated the fish.
Gillie put the cod back into the bag and went back to the store. The manager said he would give her a refund.
He also said that it was common for cod to have parasites and worms in them, both living and dead.
Gillie soon became worried that other people would also buy cod, oblivious to the fact that there may be four centimeter worms in them. “It wasn’t a question of money, but fish purity and people’s health,” said Gillie.
The next day, the Whole Foods district manager called her. He told her that getting parasites out of fish is difficult, especially with cod. Gillie said he told her about a light table that is used to more easily spot moving worms. The light table, or as they call it, the candling table, has a key flaw: the lighting can also affect the inspector’s eyesight, which makes parasites harder to see.
The email she received from Whole Foods the same day stated that the parasites found in white meat are “natural and generally harmless.” The information came from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. So does that mean we are supposed to eat fish even if it has something alive inside?
Gillie’s daughter posted the video taken of the moving worm on Facebook. They also sent their story to NBC News, who didn’t respond. Gillie hasn’t eaten fish since.
She does understand that purifying fish is difficult and it can’t always be successful, but in her mind, it doesn’t justify selling a polluted product. Some fish processing companies handle the precision inspection but leave the simple ones to the customers. “All I want them to do is to put up notices about buying cod; people should know that purchasing a product free from parasites is difficult,” says Gillie.
While there are ways for an average consumer to get rid of parasites, they seem too specific and complex for one to understand. It takes just one minute to kill them in their larva stage in an environment of at least 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but when they are an adult it takes ten minutes to kill. They can be frozen to death at -4 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is an hour long wait.
The culprits have been identified as a type of round worm, also known as nematodes. The cod worm, along with the herring worm, is the most common species of nematodes found in fish. Cod are big fish and can reach a maximum size of 200 centimeters. The worms tend to be in the larger fish since they eat more.
You can tell if it is a cod worm if it is four centimeters and if it is cream colored or dark brown (dark brown in Gillie’s case). Usually there is only a maximum of three worms in one fish.
It is not the retailer’s or processor’s fault that parasites cannot be fully removed from fish. Gillie still thinks that maybe there could be changes made to fish vendors. “Why not go forward and make changes? Not everything we eat is pure,” says Gillie.