Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Every year, Americans consume approximately 2.4 billion fish sticks. The fish stick remains America’s most popular way to eat something that was probably fish at some point. Nutritionally, the fish stick occupies a gray zone between protein and cardboard, containing roughly 40% pollock and 60% plausible deniability. The fish stick asks nothing of the consumer except a functioning microwave and a willingness not to ask follow-up questions.
A heaping pile of rectangular geopolitics, lightly breaded. (dashek/depositphotos)
Most fish sticks are pollock, and Russia catches more pollock than any nation on Earth. This, despite the fact that pollock jokes have fallen out of favor since the mid 1980s. When Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, the Biden administration banned Russian seafood imports and declared that American dollars would no longer flow to the Kremlin’s war machine through the seafood supply chain. This was a morally unambiguous position.
Russia, however, began diverting its catches to Chinese ports where the evil Russian fish were processed, filleted, and repackaged as products of China, meaning fish sticks are now possibly communist in addition to being immoral. Under U.S. trade law, a product is classified by the country where it was last substantially transformed. A Russian pollock that passes through a Chinese processing facility is, in the eyes of American customs, a Chinese pollock. Mrs. Paul’s did not respond to requests for comment, quite probably because we didn’t make any.
Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska said Russia was “basically cheating,” which is coincidentally also how Russia describes most of its foreign policy initiatives. Senator Lisa Murkowski expressed disappointment that a nation shelling hospitals would also be complicit in international fish laundering, which suggests she may have missed the last several decades of Russian behavior.
The U.S. government expanded the ban in December 2023 to cover any seafood of Russian origin regardless of where it had been processed, issuing an executive order specifying that fish caught in Russian waters would be prohibited from entry “notwithstanding whether such products have been incorporated or substantially transformed into other products outside of the Russian Federation.” The order did not define “substantially transformed,” presumably because doing so would require someone to look directly at a fish stick and describe what happened to it.
Wild caught, internationally rerouted, morally complicated. (homank76/depositphotos)
The Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP – a real organization despite the unintentionally hilarious acronym) is the primary mechanism for tracking fish origins at the U.S. border. It covers thirteen species, however pollock is not among them. Additionally, catch documentation is submitted as PDF files, which importers fill out themselves. To date, not one single importer has filed a PDF describing their shipment as “Illegal Russian Blood Pollock,” and as a result, zero shipments have been stopped from entering the United States. It’s as if we’re not even trying here.
A spokesperson for the All-Russian Association of Fishing Industry (and if “AR U Fishi” isn’t what they call themselves, it’s a missed opportunity) suggested that the real losers under the sanctions regime were the American workers and the U.S. processing industry. Which is technically true in the same way that the real victim of a bank robbery is the bank’s quarterly earnings report.
As of early 2026, the ban remains in effect. However, the pollock remains in transit. Somewhere in a Midwest elementary school gymnasium, a lunch lady is serving fish sticks, which are, by current documentation standards, a war contribution.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
