Goodbye cod, hello herring: why putting a different fish on your 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 that deliver a glittering array of local fish: gleaming red mullets, iridescent mackerels, spotted dabs 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 frozen, imported varieties in UK supermarkets. So, when customers come into the shop asking for prawns, Giles Gilbert presents “these bouncing jack-in-aboxes” with a flourish, hoping to tempt buyers with the fresh, live shellfish. “I think most people are absolutely fascinated,” he says. “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 says.
“It’s frustrating when we’ve developed relationships with fishermen and we can’t take their entire catch.”
The UK is perhaps unfairly stereotyped as a nation with an unadventurous palate. But where seafood is concerned, that’s backed up by the data.
There are more than 300 species in the UK’s coastal waters, and British people eat strikingly little of it.
According to Seafish, the UK public body supporting the industry, the UK’s
“big five” – cod, pollack, salmon, tuna and prawns – comprise 62% of seafood consumed in Britain (though the Marine Stewardship Council names the big five as cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns, and reckons they make up 80% of fish and seafood eaten in the UK when consumption outside the home, in restaurants and in fish ‘n’ chip shops is included).
Most of what is eaten in the UK is imported, while the majority of what is fished in British waters is sent elsewhere.
It’s not just the UK. In the European Union, cod, pollack, salmon, tuna and prawns account for 44% of consumption. In the US, as well as these five, the 10 most popular species include tilapia, clams and catfish, accounting for 76% of seafood.
Our global eating patterns increasingly tend towards fewer and larger species, consumed further from where they are caught.
Those dietary choices fuel problems such as overfishing, resourceintensive fish farms, higher greenhouse-gas emissions, and tonnes of fish waste. The percentage of populations fished at biologically unsustainable levels is increasing worldwide, according to a recent UN report, while our appetite for seafood is also likely to grow.
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,” says Jessica Gephart, an expert in the globalisation of aquatic food at the University of Washington.
What’s on our plates – and why?
So, can we shift our diehard eating habits towards new fish? And why do we prefer cod over cockles, and salmon rather than sole? It’s a complex global picture, starting with the UK, where people once ate a wider variety of seafood, including an abundance of sprats, herring and whelks. Essex University led research published last year that offered clues about why these patterns have changed.
From the early 1900s, industrialised fishing fuelled the expansion of British boats beyond inshore waters into plentiful northern seas, where they began scooping up several hundreds of thousands tonnes of haddock and cod. Cue the spread of fish ’n’ chip shops, which found a convenient vehicle for their batter in these large, filleted and less bony fish.
After 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community, British boats lost access to more distant fishing grounds and became confined to inshore waters, where those big white fish were less abundant. But by this point, the national preference for haddock and cod was entrenched, and the UK began importing these species to fill the deficit.
“So the situation we’re in today is that we import a lot of the seafood that we consume, including those ‘big five’ species, and we export most of what we land,” says Luke Harrison, who led the Essex University study. In fact, between 1975 and 2019, the share of British fish consumed by the UK public dropped from 89% to 40%, his research showed.
Our palates have also been dulled by how we shop. Jack Clarke, seafood engagement manager at the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), says: “The homogenisation of our diet, especially around seafood, is probably due to our over-reliance on supermarkets.”
Big chains need to secure large and consistent supplies of easily processable seafood, which usually creates a bias towards a smaller number of fish from bigger species that are caught by larger fisheries, he says. This could increase pressure on wild stocks or push retailers towards species raised in fish farms.
The simplifying effect of our globalised food system is most obvious in wealthy countries. Anna Sturrock, an aquatic ecologist at Essex University, and a co-author of the study, says: “We can afford these imports. That’s probably the main reason it hasn’t changed: we’ve got a taste for it, and it’s always been available to us.”
That is echoed in the US, where prawns make up more than 30% of Americans’ annual consumption of seafood. About 90% are imported from countries such as Indonesia and India, where the farming of prawns has been implicated in labour abuses and the destruction of mangroves. Yet UScaught prawns met half of the national demand in the 1980s.
Even as one of the top six seafood producers worldwide, the US imports about 65% of what it consumes. “US seafood consumption is dominated by a few species,” says Gephart. “A significant share of that also comes from canned and processed forms, like frozen breaded patties.”
Research by Seafish shows that convenience is a key driver of consumer choices in Britain, and our impoverished palates as a result may help explain why we have lost our taste for kippers and turn up our noses at the mussels that are abundant off UK shores.
David Willer, at Cambridge University, has researched underexploited seafood, such as mussels. “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 says.
In India, another top global producer of fish, tropical waters support a great diversity of species, but in lower quantities. As Divya Karnad, a marine geographer and conservationist at Ashoka University, near Delhi, explains, that means a fisher who catches 100 local fish is likely to have several dozen species in his net.
“Historically, coastal India had ways of dealing with this, either by having recipes specifically for different fish, or having a generic recipe in which they could add many species,” she says.
But with an increasingly urbanised population in India, she adds: “People don’t have enough time to handle their food. So instead of cleaning hundreds of small fish, if you can get a fillet then you will choose that.”
Karnad’s research has drawn a link between this more selective diet and overfishing. Picture that fisherman hauling in his catch of 100 diverse fish, she says. “But now, he’s able to sell only 15. So he has to go out that many more times to actually make up the cost.”
She also believes there is an aspirational quality attached to some fish species, such as Norwegian salmon, which is now in demand among wealthy people. This fish is now ubiquitous globally, says Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, global lead for nutrition and public health at WorldFish, which aims to reduce hunger, malnutrition and poverty across Africa, Asia and the Pacific through sustainable aquaculture.
Thilsted, the 2021 recipient of the World Food Prize, found salmon on sale even in the diverse seafood markets of Thailand. Japan did not use salmon in sushi a few decades ago but now it’s everywhere, she says, swaddled in blankets of sticky rice.
“That has something to do with the power of the private market – that foods that are considered desirable, aspirational, have moved across borders,” Thilsted says.
What should be on our plates?
How do we begin to disentangle these patterns to eat more sustainably? There is no magic bullet for something as complicated as seafood, says Sturrock at Essex University, adding: “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 as well as social factors – labour rights, fishers’ livelihoods – embedded in our choice of fish.
And there are trade-offs. A local, small-scale fishery may still be putting pressure on a delicate population, while a more distant fishery might have higher carbon emissions but be exploiting a more stable population.
Even farmed salmon, with all its problems, is not so clearcut when emissions from its production are lower than those associated with chicken, and improvements in breeding and feed are bringing those emissions down further, says Gephart, at the University of Washington. This can make sustainable eating feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. “It is really hard and unreasonable to put that on consumers,” she says.
Governments do need to make better decisions about where and what is fished, and how to support fishers to work more sustainably in a difficult industry. However, “that doesn’t mean that we should throw up our hands and say that ‘seafood is bad, it’s all too complicated’,” Gephart says.
“It’s about how we signal our values for sustainable production, so that we can lean on industry and governments.”
Clarke, at the MCS, suggests getting guidance on what populations are green-rated, or to find alternatives, from sources such as its own Good Fish Guide or Seafood Watch, produced by the US not-for-profit organisation Monterey Bay Aquarium.
For instance, for those wanting a change from salmon, which makes up almost a third of all fish eaten in the UK, farmed trout has fewer pollution issues and also uses less fish in the feed, Clarke says. “And they’re really tasty, with a similar flavour profile to salmon, and just as simple to cook.”
If you live close to a fishmonger, tap into their knowledge too, he adds. They will also have a more diverse array of fish than most supermarkets.
“If we make room for diverse foods on the plate, then we will be getting closer to the goals we aspire to,” says Thilsted. Eating a wider variety of fish takes pressure off certain populations, and shift our diets towards smaller species that are green-rated, such as herrings and sardines, which can be eaten whole, thereby helping tackle fish waste.
It also shifts the spotlight on to shellfish and bivalves such as mussels. If there is one seafood with almost universal environmental credibility, this is it, says Gephart, whose research shows that of all aquatic foods, farmed mussels and seaweeds have the lowest environmental impact. Together, they can create refuges for ocean species, while mussels also have protein levels similar to beef.
The challenge now is increasing consumer demand, says Willer, at Cambridge University. He is working with the food industry on innovative projects to make mussels, for instance, more palatable to the British public.
Others are taking the more futuristic leap into lab-grown seafood to relieve pressure on overfished populations. Meanwhile, others are working to build sustainability across the wider industry. In India, Karnad set up InSeason Fish, which works with restaurants to raise awareness of fish to avoid and to promote alternatives, depending on the region and month.
“We realised that in culinary institutes in India, chefs were not being trained with indigenous ingredients. They were instead learning about French cuisine,” says Karnad, whose organisation trains chefs in how to prepare India’s diverse fish. It has also brought in local fishers directly to advise chefs on the incoming catch and procure what they need.
In another attempt to diversify menus, a British company called CH&Co, which caters for venues including schools, hospitals, and offices, is focused on reducing the use of the big five. They provide their clients with data about the proportion of big five species that they are buying, and then take steps to educate and challenge their culinary teams to reduce the use of these fish.
As a result, “chefs are putting more diverse species at the centre of menus and working to change customer attitudes to what fish species should appear on a plate”, says Clare Clark, the head of sustainability at CH&Co.
The changing face of sustainable seafood has provided new ways to “vote with your wallet”, says Jack Clarke, adding: “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 supplied 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 that the tide is turning: “We just seem to have more and more interest in what we’re doing here.”
People are looking for cod or salmon when there’s this immaculate fish that’s been caught maybe an hour ago
Giles Gilbert, fishmonger
Were his friends worried that reliving it would destroy him? Or that an indifferent response from audiences would destroy his residual faith in other people? “I guess all of the above, but they were particularly worried because they didn’t think it was funny.”
Gadd is, on stage and screen (I spoke to him by video call), funny in a lot of ways, deadpan, effortless, penetrating … Most of all, you’d group it under: “It’s funny because it’s true.”
His TV miniseries Baby Reindeer landed on Netflix last Sunday, and was officially a global hit by the middle of this week, with 2.6 million viewers. It has been the streaming service’s No 1 TV show in both the US and the UK and, at the time of writing, boasted a rarely spotted Rotten Tomatoes score of 100%. The programme is technically a screen adaptation of Gadd’s show of the same name, which came three years after Monkey See Monkey Do, but it’s actually more of a meld of both.
“It’s clearly struck a chord,” he says. “I really did believe in it, but it’s taken off so quickly that I do feel a bit windswept.”
Audiences weren’t necessarily drawn in by the fact that this was based on a true story, since some have been astonished to find that out. Names and identifying details have been changed – Gadd plays the lead, but his character is called Donny – while chronology and some events have been “tweaked slightly to create dramatic climaxes”, he says. “It’s very emotionally true, obviously: I was severely stalked and severely abused. But we wanted it to exist in the sphere of art, as well as protect the people it’s based on.”
In 2015, a woman, who can’t be named but is called Martha in Baby Reindeer, began stalking Gadd. Somewhat older than him in the drama, two decades older in real life, Martha is a chilling presence from the outset. Donny works in a bar and cannot stop her sitting opposite him for hours on end, drinking a single Diet Coke and love-bombing him with eerily closely observed compliments. She gets hold of his email address and messages him hundreds of times a day. When she finds out he’s a comedian, she derails all his gigs, standing up in the audience and telling everyone she’s his girlfriend. It’s particularly piquant because Gadd’s comedy itself is studiedly awkward and confusing; you can see an audience being genuinely perplexed by this intense, besotted, unhinged participant. Is she part of the act? Or is the act about to disintegrate?
Martha is a fantasist about a lot of things. She says she’s a lawyer, whereas in fact she was struck off after a previous conviction for stalking her barrister boss. She says a lot of things, but most insistently she says she loves Donny and he loves her. Once she knows where he lives, she watches the house and harasses his ex-girlfriend both virtually and in person.
While stalking is much more common than one might realise – the most recent figures show that about 7 million people in England and Wales have been stalked – there is also something about Gadd’s story that speaks to universal anxieties, and may account for its overnight success, which he describes as “like lightning in a bottle”. So much happens between strangers online – overfamiliarity flipping into aggressive fantasy, sexual obsession shading into hatred and rage – and it’s never plain how seriously you’re supposed to take it. The best way to stay sane is to treat it as nothing, the wallpaper of modernity, like muzak in a lift. But there’s always this lingering question: what if it transferred to the physical world? And how, given the casual personal disclosures of the virtual world, would you ever escape from someone who had decided to pass from one to the other? The answer is: you can’t.
Gadd, 34, is incredibly hard on himself and his part in this nightmare dynamic; the plot really lingers on the times he might have shut the situation down. Did he lead Martha on by giving her a Diet Coke on the house? Was the real catastrophe that he took her for a cup of tea once? I personally doubt there was any path of righteous firmness that he could successfully have taken, since his stalker was miles from reality from the outset. But Gadd is resolute on his own part in this: “People are afraid to admit they made mistakes, and I think a lot of mistakes by humans are made through people-pleasing. You stay in a lie because it’s easier to circumvent the tension of a situation. I never wanted to upset someone who was vulnerable.”
A year in, the situation has worsened: Martha has forced Donny to move house, so she no longer knows where he lives, but has started harassing his parents. He is also at the end of his rope, having stayed silent about the sexual assault, just as Gadd himself was. “The silence was intolerable. To go through this thing, and have to go home for Christmas, and nobody knows … It is unbelievable, the pressure that puts on.” He’s on the comedy circuit, with Martha at all his gigs, falling flat most of the time. In the show, he’s a sort of terrible performer: daft props, kitsch sound effects and spangly onesies dragging partial, embarrassed laughs out of cranky audiences. It wasn’t quite that bad in real life, he says. “I don’t think I was a bad comedian,” he says tentatively, “and I actually don’t think Donny is a bad comedian – he’s just performing in the wrong way.”
It comes to a head when his agent tells him he should go to Edinburgh. This was always a high point for Gadd’s popularity: “I would go to the fringe, and I would have an amazing month. People love weird stuff up there. But then I’d perform on the comedy circuit 11 months out of the year, to silence, because people expect more stuff that they see on TV. Especially if they pay a high ticket price, they want to see dependable, seasoned, veteran comedians, and there’s this guy who’s taping ears to his nose, and they’re thinking: ‘This isn’t what I paid for.’”
By 2016, though, “I’d gone through these things, hugely tormenting experiences, and I was just thinking: ‘I can’t believe I’m about to put on a wig and false teeth again.’ The juxtaposition was impossible – I thought I couldn’t exist inside it any more.” He fell in love with a trans woman, played here by the luminous Nava Mau, and it fell apart as she became yet another focal point for his stalker’s toxic obsession. As he was preparing for Edinburgh, he recalls: “I could almost cut a line, with a knife and fork, through my anxiety. I could feel it emanating from my body.”
In the show, the story of his sexual assault pours out on stage, spontaneously. In real life, he wrote Monkey See Monkey Do and remembers the 45 minutes before its first performance, while he was trying to do the technical rehearsal. “I remember cracking up, because it was all going so badly, and the producer said, ‘What do you want from this, man?’ And I turned to him with tears in my eyes, and said, ‘I just want to make it out alive.’ Little did I know that it would provide a lifeline for me. The way people received that show, and received me, and accepted what happened to me: it saved my life. It’s mad that it happened that way.”
His stalker, however, became inflamed by his success after Monkey See Monkey Do. She cranked up her activity and threatened to start calling his parents again. Gadd grew up in Fife; his father worked in a lab in a university, while his mother had various jobs in schools. They weren’t a repressed or difficult family, but he hadn’t felt able to talk to them about being raped, nor about his confusion afterwards about his sexual identity. “You know, they’ve been lovely and supportive,” he says – but the scene in Baby Reindeer, where he’s racing up to Scotland to get to his parents and talk to them before Martha calls, is almost unbearably tense, like watching 24 but with meaning.
Gadd has worked with a charity called We Are Survivors. “I’ll always give them a shout out,” he says, “because they’ve helped me tremendously down the years, and they say breaking the silence is the first step. Sometimes I speak to male survivors, and I’m not an advice giver or a professional, but the first advice is: break the silence. Talk to someone, and if that’s too scary, just write it down, process it into something. Because I think the more you get it out, the smaller it becomes.
“I think this is changing a bit, with the generation below me,” he says. “But I certainly grew up with draconian ideas: the prince rescues the princess, to be a man is to have a stiff upper lip, don’t cry, shoulders back. Not that my dad was ever like that, but that’s the societal expectation and it really makes its way into your subconscious. When you go through something like sexual abuse, a lot of the disempowerment can come from these old ideas of what it means to be a man. Certainly when I shook off that idea, and realised that speaking out and saying ‘I’m struggling’ is a form of strength, sloughing off the idea that masculinity was the only form of survival – that was very healing.”
The show Gadd is writing now for the BBC, Lions, “is about two brothers, and explores the themes of masculinity, growing up”. While Baby Reindeer isn’t the first time he has acted – he was in the comedy-drama Code 404 between 2020 and 2022 – Gadd is a revelation on screen. Playing a comedian, he comes off much more actor than comedian. But that standup hinterland has made his writing credentials unassailable. Nobody expects or even lets actors write very often, while that’s half the job of comedy.
So far, he has been writing from life, “and I don’t have a limitless backstory of pain to go off – I’m not going to start walking through dodgy areas just to see what happens. I don’t want to be known as the guy that just plumbs the depths of his soul, but every writer writes from within. I almost think you could have ‘based on a true story’ before every show, because all the best shows come from a certain place within someone.”
He didn’t report his sexual assault to the police; and when he finally reports his stalker in Baby Reindeer, you see a lot of those expectations around masculinity in their institutional form, such as the way the police assume Donny couldn’t possibly be in physical peril from Martha (in fact, she is violent and often terrifying). That’s alongside more general inadequacies in the policing of stalking: for instance, that Donny is required to trawl through endless messages, written and verbal, looking for the smoking gun of explicit threat, which is traumatising of itself and ultimately unproductive.
Gadd says: “I’d like to point out that I have met some good police officers in my time, that I did feel care and they did try their best.” Nevertheless, “it is almost common belief now that there is a systemic problem with the police. It is an institution which needs to change. I was always aware of the complete lack of resources available to them, the stress in their eyes and in their bodies – I could almost see it. Our public services are in complete disarray. I don’t want to get too political, but I think it’s shocking that things have been allowed to get to this point. I can think of so many examples where something’s been reported, ignored, reported, ignored, and gone on to have some very severe consequences. I did feel it when I was reporting stalking – I did feel the pinch, shall we say.”
In the stage version of Baby Reindeer, the stalker is represented by a stool. Monkey See Monkey Do was a one-man show. To have to re-enact these events with other actors – Martha is played by Jessica Gunning, in an absolutely stunning performance, and Darrien, the rapist, is played by Tom Goodman-Hill – has been “difficult”, Gadd says carefully. “It’s had triggering elements. But you hope that it builds to a catharsis, which doesn’t really come from revisiting it, but the positive response, the acceptance that people show you.
“Yes, some of the scenes we reenacted on set were really tough – I could even see that some of the props department were choked up, even the lighting people – but we all knew that we were pushing towards something that was important. I hope the show has a certain degree of greater good, and that it was worth a certain degree of self-sacrifice.”
• Baby Reindeer is available to watch on Netflix now.
• In the UK, the National Stalking Helpline is on 0808 802 0300 or email via their inquiry form. In the US, resources are available at stalkingawareness.org.
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
I could almost cut a line, with a knife and fork, through my anxiety. I could feel it emanating from my body