Parasites: Those who Inhabit us

Parasites have been coming up a lot in my life recently. Almost every day I am touching them, looking at them, talking to friends about them. Trying to understand what their role is, in me. Much of it has to do with the salmon we have been preserving; salmon are host to many parasites, but the one I have been paying particularly close attention to is a parasitic nematode this world calls Anasakis. They look like long, stringy white worms, I have seen them in the flesh of almost every salmon I’ve ever butchered, usually still alive, wriggling around. Humans are not hosts for them, they require a marine mammal’s digestive system to continue their life cycle. If a human eats the raw, fresh (drying kills them, there are no eggs present in the flesh, just obvious, living worms) meat of a host fish, they might not ever notice anything, or they might get nauseious and even puke up a clump of these little fellas. In any case, our bodies are not their chosen bodies. Salmon, of course, do carry other parasites that can inhabit our bodies. Like, say, tapeworms.

Honoring the Bodies of Salmon

The last few weeks have been incredible - salmon are returning to spawn in the rivers and creeks where we live, and almost every day we have been going to catch some.  Being in the presence of uncountable fish, watching more and more of their dead bodies wash up on the shore every day, watching their bodies shake with release as they ejaculate onto eggs or lay them and tease and fight with each other. Witnessing the fall salmon runs is essential for anyone living in the northwest to understand how truly filled with wild aliveness and magic this land can be – needs to be. In this post I want to talk about some of the amazing ways we have discovered to utilize (preserve, eat) these salmon’s bodies.