Free Lucky Stars by Jane Heller

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    Our field trip took us outside the executive offices, across a parking lot, and out to a marina, where several large boats were being unloaded in the water.
    “These just came in,” said Corbin, pointing to the recently docked boats. “They come in every day, all day, filled with catches from local waters as well as elsewhere in the Pacific. The fish are frozen at twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit as soon as they’re caught, then they’re brought to us in storage containers.”
    “How does Fin’s know the fish on these ships is any good?” asked my mother. “You hear stories. My friend Esther ate at one of the best seafood restaurants in Cleveland—she had grilled swordfish, if memory serves. Anyhow, she got so sick she couldn’t look at fish ever again. She won’t even touch scrod now, poor soul.”
    Corbin tried to seem empathetic. “At Fin’s we’re very mindful of possible spoilage, and we take great pains to prevent it.”
    “Name one great pain that you take,” challenged my mother.
    “Well, we cut samples from eight fish out of every load, and these eight samples go straight to our lab, which I’ll show you later if you like. Our technicians test the samples for the histamine levels in the fish, which tell us if there’s been spoilage from high temperature. Then they do anot her test to determine the acid content in the fish, in case there’s been spoilage from low temperature. And finally they test the percentage of salt in the fish, which should be in the one-point-five to one-point- seven range. If any o f the test results look the least bit suspicious, we throw the entire shipment of fish out.”
    “Good riddance,” I said. I was bored silly, but thought I should inte r ject a remark now and then, so they’d know I was breathing. My mother, on the other hand, was fascinated by every morsel of trivia Corbin threw at her.
    “All right, ladies, let’s move ahead to the thawing facility,” he said, leading us over to an area where rows and rows of containers held tuna—big tuna, medium tuna, small tuna, blue fin tuna, yellow fin tuna, More tuna than you’d ever want to deal with. They were stiff—dead-body stiff—and were waiting to be thawed. “See how that one’s eyes are clear, not cloudy?” Corbin had selected a rather colorful fish for his show-and-tell and was running his fingers all over it. “And see how the skin is shiny and firm, not mushy to the touch?”
    My mother leaned over and fondled the fish herself. “I do see,” she acknowledged.
    I should add here that the smell of fish was as omnipresent as it was vile. There was no q uestion that I would have to burn the clothes I was wearing, especially the shoes, which were covered in jus de fish guts.
    “The fish will be thawed over here,” said Corbin, moving into an area with giant hoses everywhere, along with more containers of frozen tuna. “They’ll be soaked in water for five hours until the backbone temperature is thirty-five degrees. Then, our people will remove the entrails and cut the fish into chunks and cook them at two hundred and fifty degrees for forty-five minutes to four hours, depen ding on the size of the fish.”
    While I attempted to keep my breakfast down, Corbin walked us into yet another area. “I call this the London Fog room,” he said, gesturing into the air, which was fetid with steam haze and foul with fish fumes. “It’s sixty degrees in here and a hundred percent humidity, so the fish can cool down enough for the skin to be cut off easily.”
    “And then what happens?” asked my mother. “Because I have a feeling we’re getting to the crucial stages of the process.”
    Corbin concurred. “I’m about to take you into what is essentially our mission control.” He laughed. Even he knew how stupid this exercise was.
    He escorted us into a warehouse-type space where there were hundreds of women with plastic caps on their heads and plastic aprons over their clothes and small