The seas and oceans are at the heart of our planet’s ecosystem but, with stocks of many fish under pressure, it’s increasingly difficult to know which to buy. Clare Finney investigates why locally caught species are a great way to diversify the fish you eat, then five pros show you how to cook with them
FEATURE WORDS CLARE FINNEY FOOD PHOTOGRAPHS DAVID LOFTUS FOOD STYLING LIBBY SILBERMANN
be a sustainable cook.
WHY SHOULD WE EAT FISH? It’s a valid question. If you watched the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy, you might have concluded that we shouldn’t, full stop. The focus the makers placed on supertrawlers and intensive farms led many to conclude fishing was inherently unsustainable; that – as they’d claimed – we’d run out of fish completely by 2048 if we continued to fish in the same way. That claim is one of many to have been resoundingly debunked (the author of the scientific paper that made the claim has completely rescinded his views) yet the general sense of unease around seafood lingers on.
Part of the problem is that in recent decades Brits haven’t been that comfortable venturing beyond cod, prawns, haddock, salmon and tuna. “80% of the fish we eat comes from those five species,” says George Clark, UK & IE programme director at the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), an independent certification body responsible for the blue MSC ecolabel marking a seafood product as sustainable. “With 2,500 species of seafood, there’s a huge opportunity to diversify and spread the pressure.” To discount fish is to discount a climate-friendly, nutritious and versatile food that, properly fished, is in abundance. To say stop fishing completely is, says seafood chef Mitch Tonks, “too binary a take”.
WHAT ABOUT BUYING BRITISH?
One strong argument is that the shorter the supply chain, the fresher and better the seafood. At present we export 80% of what we catch in the UK and import 80% of what we eat. That’s “crazy”, says Nick Jefferson, founder of Wylde Market: a virtual market for buying direct from small-scale producers around the UK.
Hayden Scamp is one of the fishermen supplying Wylde Market. He fishes by rod and line from a small day boat and exports over 90% of his catch each day. “I’d like to sell more to the UK. It’s more sustainable from a business perspective than being reliant on foreign markets, but we are set in our ways with the species we eat, and I can’t sell species like dover sole here for as much as I can in Holland.”
WHAT ABOUT SEASONALITY?
When buying fresh, this is important – and exciting. As I speak to Hayden, wild sea bass have just come
