FOOD AND LOATHING : The Sea, My Enemy

The summer that I was 18, I lived on Kodiak Island in Alaska, working 12-hour shifts at several fish canneries. It’s too complicated to explain what I was doing there in the first place. The short version is that the luxurious rent-free three-bedroom country house that my friends lured me up there with turned out to be an abandoned World War II Quonset hut with no running water or electricity or indoor plumbing, located so far out in the boonies that no one would come visit us.

Our drafty quarters were completely unfurnished, unless you counted several khaki Army cots and some overturned packing crates. To get to town we had to sprint up an unpaved three-mile road to get to the main highway--the garbage dump near our encampment drew killer Kodiak bears. I had blown all of my savings getting up there.

I stayed nearly three months--until the day I had enough money to buy a plane ticket home. That evening my friends and several neighbors threw me an all-night bon voyage party at the bar at the Kodiak Island Coast Guard base. The specialty of the house was cocktails that cost 15 cents each. No proof that you were of drinking age was required. By dawn, we’d all been arrested for disorderly conduct, our mug shots had been snapped and we were warned that we’d be jailed if we ever set foot on the base again. Like I needed an excuse.

My first day in Alaska, my friends took me to buy a pair of rubber knee-boots with steel shanks inserted in the sole for added support and discomfort. Then they got me a job sizing crab claws, which meant putting pieces of crustaceans into piles of small, medium and large. Two hours into my first shift, I noticed that I was much faster and more efficient than anyone else at my work station. In fact, by the day’s end, I had arrived at the incredible realization that when it came to crab-sorting, I probably was a natural.

It wasn’t until much later that I grasped the concept that anyone with any brains had already figured out: Whether you worked fast or in slow motion, at the end of the week you still got the same paycheck. I can’t imagine how irritated my co-workers must have been to see me hustling away. But before they could advise me to knock it off, the head boss promoted me to crab de-giller.

I’d stand in front of a machine that looked like a long sandpaper-covered rolling pin, while an aproned man facing me buzz-sawed live crabs in two and then tossed them at me. My responsibilities were as follows: I’d knock out the crab’s creamy innards by whacking the half-shell on my upper thigh. After that, I would strip off the outer hull, thus exposing the gills--gray gelatinous strips that to me looked like a hula skirt. Next I’d remove the gills by holding the crab against the spinning rolling pin. Then I would fling the de-gilled crab over my shoulder into a gigantic blue plastic tub and start all over again.

The chore required more physical endurance than my last position. It was also boring--at least big, little and medium involved minor estimatory headwork. To break the monotony, I hit upon a private game that involved trying to predict what color the internal organs would be before they went flying past my kneecap. For whatever it’s worth, I discovered that crab guts come in three shades--pale avocado, orange and a lemony yellow. I forget which one got the most points.

It was during this period that whatever enthusiasm I had for fish slipped away. New friends that I’d made would invite me over to eat food they’d swiped from the cannery--for swordfish steaks, for crab cakes, for shrimp salad. But I’d politely decline. My ban on seafood blossomed into an overall boycott on all things nutritional. The only things I liked to eat were Swiss Miss Instant Hot Cocoa, cake doughnuts and Rice-A-Roni Noodles Romanoff.

Eventually, I traded on my prestige as a crab de-giller to get transferred to a picturesque wharf-side shrimp cannery. What I did there was stand on a six-foot-high steel scaffold, which shuddered violently from the force of a machine that shook bits of rock and seaweed from the piles of freshly caught shrimp moving along a black conveyor belt.

As cannery jobs go, it wasn’t bad. The only drawback was that when they switched off the vibrating mechanism, the scaffold stopped rumbling but your legs didn’t. One day, on my way to my coffee break, I missed a rung while climbing shakily down the tall ladder and crashed to the concrete floor below. The foreman, sensing that I’d had about all I could take, took pity on me and gave me the dreamiest assignment of my entire stay: sitting on a high wooden stool and yanking a rope cord every so often to open the chute from which tons of still-wriggling long-tailed decapods came slithering out.

At this point in my Aleutian Islands adventure, I had nothing left to prove. I was stuck in a world that was neither light nor dark, a place whose equatorial location made it seem as if the earth’s dimmer switch had gotten stuck mid-twirl.

My teen spirit had crumbled from the long hours, the crumminess of my living situation and the fact that my skin, hair and clothing had absorbed too much shrimp brine. No matter what I did, I exuded the sharp scent of brackish aquarium water, something that would have undermined my confidence had not everyone I knew smelled like that too.

Every night, when I was finished with work, I’d hitchhike home and put a dingy pillow over my head to block out the muted rays of sun. And just before I fell asleep, I’d see on my closed eyelids the vision of translucent marine life slowly drifting by.

I like to write about these times because no one ever lets me talk about them. When people ask me why I don’t eat fish and I say it’s because I worked at a cannery, they always stop the conversation. They immediately assume that I’m going to relate to them the same kind of insider’s view of meat factories that now make it impossible for them to eat hot dogs. But I never saw anything more disgusting than mushy pungent shrimp cooked forever before being quick-frozen to mask the fact that they were over-the-hill.

What I never get to say is that everything about that summer came to represent an occupational benchmark to me: No matter how hard I work, it will never be as hard as that prison term on Kodiak Island. I don’t mind the sight of frutti di mare , or the aroma. But my taste buds go on red alert at any hint of ocean life. Not eating fish is my way of holding a grudge, one gone so haywire that it doesn’t allow for a quarter teaspoon of anchovy paste in a pasta sauce or a tiny sand-dune of fish flakes covering pad Thai. It’s a concept that people have a difficult time accepting and that I have trouble communicating. When I go to a restaurant, I don’t want to “pick around the shrimp.” Would you want anything on your plate that you’d once spent an entire unhappy summer sunk up to your wrists in?

Sometimes I just lie and say that I’m allergic. This helpful tip I learned from an ex-boyfriend, who’d usually kick dinner off by informing our table-mates that if he ate fish, he’d . . . die . It’s nice to recall those moments sitting next to him, assured that no one was going to nag me about trying just one bite. With him on my side, we created a wonderful united front. And because he was one of those people who turned out to be undesirable in many other ways, it’s good to have something to look back fondly upon.

I once had a friend who didn’t eat cheese. And try as I might, I couldn’t envision a life without it. It seemed so self-punishing not to allow oneself even some freshly grated Reggiano or a rich smear of Saint Andre on a cracker. And this is what people must think when there’s a whole part of the restaurant menu that I won’t even bother to skim. So I’ve managed to come up with a few exceptions--I’ll occasionally order pleasantly rubbery dishes like soft-shell crab, candied jellyfish and sauteed squid or calamari . But I eat them only because they’re almost completely tasteless, and because when it comes to making my friends happy, this seems like such an easy way.

At first, The Times Test Kitchen thought it could fool a fish hater into eating fish with a subtle trout mousseline, so full of butter and cream that the fact it is made from fish becomes more or less incidental. But Margy Rochlin can pick out the tiniest bit of fish in any dish, no matter how well it’s hidden. Still, she will eat fried squid--though not fried shrimp, fried clams, fried scallops or fried fish of any kind. And so we settled on this calamari recipe from “The New Basics Cookbook,” by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. Besides using the relatively un-fishy squid, there’s lots of chili powder, black pepper and hot pepper sauce to distract her.

CAJUN-FRIED CALAMARI 2 pounds squid, cleaned 1 1/2 cups flour 1/4 cup ground cumin 1/4 cup chili powder 1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups corn oil Hot pepper sauce 1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves 2 lemons, quartered

Cut squid sac into 1/4-inch-thick rings. Cut tentacles into 3/4-inch pieces.

Combine flour, cumin, chili powder, pepper and salt in shallow bowl.

Heat oil in large skillet. Dredge squid in flour mixture. Shake off any excess. Fry in hot oil in several batches until brown and crisp. After frying, add several dashes hot pepper sauce. Drain on paper towels.

Sprinkle cilantro on top of squid and serve with quartered lemons. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about: 625 calories; 557 mg sodium; 793 mg cholesterol; 20 grams fat; 50 grams carbohydrates; 60 grams protein; 2.43 grams fiber.

Note : If squid has not been cleaned when purchased, hold squid in 1 hand and with other hand pull tentacles and insides out of sac in 1 piece. Cut off tentacles just above eyes and discard insides. Squeeze out and discard hard knot just within cut side of tentacles. Remove cartilage from sac (it looks like cellophane). Under running water, peel off outer skin of sac. Rinse sac and tentacles thoroughly. Pat dry.