Fins ain’t what they used to be

Charles Clover says that there’s only one way to beat the celebrity chefs who are wiping out every endangered fish in the sea: take a trip to McDonald’s

In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century British and Norwegians did to the great whales, and what people in this century are doing to rainforests and bushmeat. This crisis is caused by overfishing. Given that the destruction of once renewable sources of food is a serious problem for the human race, you would imagine it might have troubled the opinion-formers in the culinary establishment. But some of them still aren’t making the connections. In the world’s celebrity restaurants, the marine equivalent of the panda, the rhino and the dodo are on the menu.