Oh, I didn’t think he was flip flopping. I just wanted to make a note that Yamaoka had stated mackerel was his favorite and that it made sense for him to be upset about it if the quality had dipped.
As for the machine being wonky, that’s entirely believable, but I wasn’t sure if they were discussing a different part of the story, so I didn’t change it like I did when at the end, it started referring to the saury as sardines. I also see that saury is also called “mackerel pike”, so that’s probably where the machine fucked up. I’ll go in and fix it as soon as I can get to my laptop.