The first time I encountered the Amazonian fish paiche, also called arapaima, was while watching the extreme-fishing show River Monsters. The thrashing, carnivorous fish had a bony head, required two men to lift it out of the water, and weighed about 150 pounds—a modest size for the largest fish in the Amazon River basin.
The second time I encountered paiche, I was at Whole Foods (WFM).
The high-end supermarket has been promoting farmed paiche (pronounced pie-chay) from Peru as a cheaper option to halibut or Chilean sea bass for more than a year. The grocer has a specific goal: to combat the overfishing of wild paiche in South America by generating demand for the farm-raised version in the U.S., where barely anyone knows how to pronounce it, let alone cook it. To save it, the theory goes, we first have to eat it.
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