For anyone who likes eating fish, the sustainability question is always a big issue. I grew up eating fish (rockfish, bluefish, weakfish, sea bass, flounder, porgy) and still today, would prefer eating fish over most anything else. Unfortunately fish management around the world is quite poor so fish farming has been promoted as the best option. It's necessary, perhaps, though that too is creating other problems such as the heavy need for feed fish to sustain the farm populations. A few young Dutch fish suppliers are looking to get around the problem by seeking out sustainable fish supplies from around the world.
The idea itself is good - supporting such an industry is a step in the right direction - though it also then forces the issue of adding to the troubled environment. Selling fresh, wild fish from Alaska is great, but in order to remain fresh, it's going to have to be sent via airliners. That is definitely a step in the wrong direction. The Dutch fish mongers believe the sustainable fish supplies deliver lower carbon footprints though it sounds like a tough sell. Maybe, but it sounds like a stretch. The general direction these days is to make attempts to eat locally. Then the issue is back to what in the world is the EU (or US or Japan, etc) doing about their own backyard? But then, that is a much bigger problem.
Focusing on the problem locally sounds like a much more sustainable long term solution, but maybe this approach is OK in the near term.
The idea is to get people to connect with their fish in the way they do with their meat. But where butchers can now tell you which farm an animal grew up on, who its parents were and how it voted on X Factor, "the sea is not that transparent", says van Olphen drily. Provenance is not that easy with fish unless it has MSC certification. North Sea cod could have been caught anywhere within thousands of square miles, within a wide time frame and by a variety of unspecified methods.
Van Olphen certainly doesn't agree with the doom-mongers who say we must all give up fish to save stocks, but neither, despite the theme of the book, does he think that sustainable fishing in the wild is a long-term solution. "With the population growing at its current rate, farmed fisheries are the only answer," he says. "But our farming practices aren't sustainable. It takes 12kg of wild fish in feed to add just one kilo of weight to farmed fish; roughly one third of all wild fish caught around the world is pulped to create foodstuffs for other animals. Within 20 years we'll run out of fish stocks.
