Goodbye cod, hello herring
Why putting different fish on a dish will help the planet
Perched on a quay in the Cornish port of Falmouth is Pysk fishmongers, where Giles and Sarah Gilbert started out with a dream to supply locally caught seafood to the town. Their catch comes mainly from small boats delivering an array of local fish: red mullet, mackerel, spotted dab and bright white scallops, still snapping in their shells.
Occasionally they will get a treasured haul of local common prawns – stripy, smaller and sweeter than the supermarket frozen, imported varieties. So, when customers come into the shop asking for prawns, Giles Gilbert presents “these bouncing jack-in-a-boxes” with a flourish.
“I think most people are absolutely fascinated,” he said. “But they’ll say, ‘Have you got anything a bit bigger than that?’ or, ‘I wanted something that was already cooked.’”
Time and again, Gilbert finds himself rummaging around in the freezer to retrieve an emergency bag of imported shellfish, lest he lose a loyal customer.
It’s not just prawns. “We have access to some incredible fish, but it stays on the counter because what people are looking for is cod or salmon, when there’s this immaculate fish that’s been caught maybe an hour ago,” he said.
“It’s frustrating when we’ve developed relationships with fishermen and we can’t take their entire catch.”
There are more than 300 species in UK coastal waters, and British people eat strikingly little of them. According to the Marine Stewardship Council cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns make up 80% of fish and seafood eaten in Britain at home, in restaurants and in fish and chip shops.
Most of what is eaten in Britain is imported, while most of what is fished in British waters is sent elsewhere. Those dietary choices fuel problems such as overfishing, resource-intensive fish farms, higher greenhouse gas emissions, and tonnes of fish waste.
The picture appears bleak – and yet, if selected and consumed carefully, seafood provides a powerful opportunity to improve the environmental impact of our diets overall.
“Seafood can be, and in some situations is being, produced very sustainably, especially when compared to other terrestrial animal-source foods,” said Jessica Gephart, an expert in the globalisation of aquatic food at the University of Washington in Seattle. Research by Seafish, the UK public body supporting the industry, shows that convenience is an important driver of consumer choices, and our resulting impoverished palates may explain why we have lost our taste for kippers and turn up our noses at the mussels that are abundant off British shores.
David Willer, at Cambridge University, has researched underexploited seafood. “We’ve done lots of research on that, and it’s mostly down to convenience and ease of preparation, and a kind of ‘yuck’ factor,” he said.
So, what should be on our plates? There is no magic bullet for something as complicated as seafood, said Anna Sturrock, an aquatic ecologist at Essex University. “When we think about sustainability, it’s not just about overfishing, it’s also about how far we bring it from different places, and the impact of that fishery, or the aquaculture type, on the local environment.” There is also the issue of fish waste and social factors such as labour rights and fishers’ livelihood.
And there are trade-offs. A small-scale fishery may still be putting pressure on a delicate local stock, while a more distant fishery may have higher carbon emissions but be exploiting a more stable fish population. Jack Clarke, seafood engagement manager at the Marine Conservation Society suggests getting guidance on what populations are green-rated, or to find alternatives, from sources such as its own Good Fish Guide.
For those wanting a change from salmon, which makes up almost a third of all fish eaten in Britain, Clarke said farmed trout had fewer pollution issues and also used less fish in the feed. “And they’re really tasty and just as simple to cook.”
If you live close to a fishmonger, tap into their sustainability knowledge too, he added.
Eating a wider variety of fish could take pressure off certain populations and shift our diets towards smaller green-rated species such as herring and sardines. It also shifted the spotlight on to shellfish and bivalves such as mussels.
If there is one seafood with almost universal environmental credibility, this is it, according to Gephart, whose research shows farmed mussels and seaweeds have the lowest environmental impact of all aquatic foods. Together, they can create refuges for ocean species, while mussels also have protein levels similar to beef.
The challenge now was to increase consumer demand, Willer said. He is working with the food industry on innovative projects to make mussels, for instance, more palatable to the British public.
The changing face of sustainable seafood provided new ways to “vote with your wallet”, said Clarke. “It really does have an effect.”
In Cornwall, Gilbert is seeing people doing exactly that. In a recent experiment, he displayed three types of scallops on his fish counter, each with the catch method and sustainability information alongside the price. To his surprise, he found customers preferred the most expensive but sustainable hand-dived scallops.
He may not have won them over on the local prawns yet. But he senses the tide is turning: “We just seem to have more and more interest in what we’re doing here.”