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Food

California Shark Meat Is Now Full of Poison

California-caught shark meat was recently found to contain 100 times over the legal limit of DDT. This is especially bad news for people terrified of sharks already.

First your drought, then your skyrocketing real estate prices, and now your locally caught seafood is laced with DDT? Man, California, you're definitely not looking as dreamy as you once did. It may be time—yet again—to think twice about eating fish, even the wild-caught varieties. A seafood dinner in California now means gambling your digestion away on the devils that are artificially colored farmed salmon or worse, poop-eating tilapia.

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A recently released study performed on a 22-year-old, 1,300-pound mako shark caught off Surf City, USA (a.k.a. Huntington Beach) in June 2013 found that California's ocean water is toxic as hell, according to a report by OC Register.

READ: Sharks Could Be the Future of the Seafood Industry

How toxic? Well, based on EPA standards, the shark meat tested to be 100 times over the legal limit—for human consumption at least—of the pernicious pesticide DDT, 250 times over the legal limit of PCBs (a group of industrial chemicals whose manufacturing was banned in 1979), and 45 times the safe limits of mercury.

The worst part is that this is 100-percent humanity's fault. Specifically, local California chemical factories straight-up dumped DDT-laced trash water into the ocean in the 1950s—1,700 tons of the stuff to be more precise.

And while a thick filet of the apex predator of the sea—and your galeophobia-fueled nightmares—may not be the first type of fish that you look for your weekly seafood dinner splurge, its deeply contaminated flesh is definitely indicative of the overall quality of seafood along Southern California's coast. If it's not man-made chemicals on sharks, then it's naturally occurring toxic algae blooms on mussels, crabs, anchovies, and crabs, as the local public radio station KPCC pointed out earlier this month.

This toxic-ass shark discovery comes just a month short of the two-year anniversary of the Golden State's shark fin ban, and if this isn't enough to stave off fans of the sinewy piece of fish meat that can fetch up to $335 per pound, we don't know what will. It also comes at a time when even "sustainably caught" pollock is fucking up the planet.

But instead of having an existential pescatarian crisis, remember: You can always freedive for properly sized and tagged abalone in Northern California or uni. If these two options aren't for you, then yeah, it may be time to just leave the City of [toxic] Angels altogether and head east to Alabama, home of the cleanest beach in the United States.