The buying guides’ general aim is to persuade consumers to always eat small, oily pelagic fish, to avoid eating farmed salmon, cod and other trawl-caught groundfish. In the language of sustainability, avoid means that you can eat fish as long as they are expensive and you don’t do it too often.
Another favorite phrase is that we should “eat responsibly.” This seems to mean that it is OK to eat the fish in question if it is expensive and beyond the purchasing power of ordinary mortals. Thus, it is OK to “responsibly eat” the occasional Dover sole in a Michelin-starred restaurant but not if it turns up on the menu of the local fish-and-chip shop.
For those of us not able to afford to “responsibly eat” an expensive species, we are implored to look for a “sustainable alternative.” This seems like good advice until you do the math and realize that if we all took this advice and switched to the sustainable alternative, then it too would rapidly come under pressure and become unsustainable. This is particularly concerning when the suggested alternative species is from a data-deficient stock.
A good example of flawed advice on this subject appeared in a cookery article in a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph, a UK broadsheet that has often been keen to dispense sustainability advice through the well-known environmentalist, Charles Clover. In the article in question, the celebrity chef of the day suggested that a more sustainable replacement for wild Atlantic salmon in a recipe would be wild sea trout, known as “sewin” in Wales and as “peel” in the West of England. In cookery terms it was good advice, but in terms of sustainability it was complete nonsense. Wild sea trout are extremely rare and highly unlikely to be encountered in a high-street fishmonger.
About the Author:
Nicki Holmyard has written about the seafood industry for the past 20 years, travelling the globe to research in-depth articles, interviews and news stories on fishing, aquaculture and processing. She has written for a number of international journals and national newspapers, and contributed to several books on sustainable seafood sourcing.
Nicki is a director of a company that is currently planning to set up Europe’s largest rope-grown mussel farm, and also runs her own seafood communications consultancy. She serves on a number of Scottish Government and other executive committees including the North Sea Regional Advisory Council (NSRAC), and is Chair of the North Sea Women in Fisheries Network. Nicki can be reached onnicki.holmyard@virgin.net