I had to ask myself this question today and well – I can :) Kind of… I was so confident about it, as I’ve butchered many fish and animals as a child, that I didn’t google it or something. I just filleted that fish like I’ve done it with other fishes as a child. And I was very pleased with the result, as the fish was tastier than the frozen stuff. So I wondered why is this so? Why does most of the frozen fillets have no skin and no fish-fat? At the end, that’s kind of the most healthy stuff about fish, their fat. And it’s really tasty. So I googled how to filet a salmon and like you can see e.g. here it’s a pretty clean job. Not only do most of the video show removing the skin (while of course some meat stays on it and get’s trowed away), but also cutting out the middle part with all the meat on it, so that you don’t have any fish bones on the filet. While this can be nice for restaurants guest, as they may not want any bone in their filet, what it does to the filet is simply trowing most of the fish fat in the trash with some of the meat too. And that’s like crazy when you prepare a fish at home.
Fishes have fish bones, that’s just normal and you can very simply remove them once the fish is cooked and still keep the fish fat and skin on. That adds greatly to the taste and you don’t trow perfectly fine fish fat and meat in the trash. As a kid the part of fish I loved the most was the fins – they’re so tasty and crunchy. But they get cut away most of the time too. That’s not really different from people wanting to eat only the bon filet and not the rest of the caw or chicken or whatever, but may be it’ll help a bit the environment if we would recall that most of an animal can be eaten, not only the bon filet.
Of course, you can always go vegan, than you don’t have to worry about it. But if you are going to eat meat, wouldn’t it be better, if you can butcher it on your own and try to use the most of it? When all we see of a caw is the filet packed up in plastic in the supermarket, it’s hard to be aware of the costs of it for the environment or even to be aware that it was an animal earlier – it’s only a piece of meat, or isn’t it? Well, it’s a piece of an animal and it’s not worth killing it, if you’re only going to eat the one bon filet piece…