Chinatown vs Wholefoods (hint: Chinatown wins)

Yesterday I helped a friend prepare dinner for a group of our friends. On the menu was a meal I've made and enjoyed before -- Chinese steamed fish, stirfry and rice [we also made some crunchy tofu]. My friend lives close to Chinatown, and my first impulse was to go to Chinatown to buy the fish and vegis. I haltered though. What if I bought the 1$ fish and someone got sick? At least if I shopped at Wholefoods and someone got sick from the fish I could confidently say that we got the stuff from a reputable source rather than from a slightly dirty Chinatown fish store. In the end we did go to Wholefoods and got two 1.5lb red snappers. The monger removed the fins and scales, plus the guts.

To my surprise, the monger did a fairly bad job at scrapping all of the scales off of the fish. Scales on cooked fish are a little better than trying to eat someone-else's fingernails. I would have thought that a place like Wholefoods would have taken better care at properly cleaning the fish they sell. Aside from that, the fish was very yummy and cooked up nicely.

Now compare this to Chinatown. In Chinatown a generic whole fish goes for 1$ a pound, whereas at Wholefoods it goes for 10$ a pound. In Chinatown there is a pretty large selection of whole fish, however some of them are not in the best of conditions. Still, if you know how to pick them, you can easily get a fish of comparable quality to a Wholefood fish. The general rule of thumb for picking a fish is
1. Mostly covered in ice.
2. Springy to the touch ---firm and not soft or hard.
3. Eyes not clouded over.
4. No fishy smell.
5. The gills should be pink or red, not slimy or dry.
So as long as you adhere to these rules, its easy to find a good fish in Chinatown. Once you select it, the monger will clean and gut it, and in my experience does a better job than the Wholefoods monger. Make sure to have a short distance to travel, or a container in which to keep the fish cold. When you get the fish home, you should plan on cooking with it within a few hours. Before cooking, wash and clean it, then pat it dry. Also, bare in mind that whole fish comes with a fair number of bones. So watch out while eating it.
For some reason I really like eating whole fish. Maybe its the same reason people like cooking over an outdoor fire --- its closer to the way we evolved to eat. Perhaps people who enjoyed eating whole fish and cooking food over fires thrived better and had more reproductive success. A fillet of fish will do the body well, but the fires of human nature are better nourished by fish on a stick cooked over an outdoor flame.