Is it cruel to eat fish?

It was a hot late evening on the Greek island of Tinos, and we were sitting at a quayside restaurant outdoors, enjoying a nightcap glass of ouzo. One or two other tables were still occupied by diners, all of them Greek. Foreign tourism is only slowly coming back but Greece has a strong internal holiday market, and Tinos, a lovely island, is only an hour or two by ferry from the mainland.

A couple of children, small girls, were playing around the edge of the quay. The tranquil scene was now disturbed. The girls were looking in alarm at something under an unoccupied table. A big fish, beached, more than a foot long, was flopping around on the concrete, gasping. Other diners looked on, unconcerned, but I thought the children were distressed. In retrospect this could have been a mistaken assumption.

Nobody was doing anything. Acting on instinct and without much thought, I walked over, picked up the fish and threw it, wriggling, back into the sea. Then, supposing myself to have done the right thing, I returned to our table and my partner, and we carried on sipping ouzo and chatting. I should have asked myself how the creature had ended up on the quayside and whether it belonged to a fisherman, but I didn’t.

Some time later a Greek woman, substantial, in her sixties I’d guess, leaned over from her table and began to berate me in broken English. ‘Why you throw fish into the sea?’ she asked.

I didn’t really know how best to reply. ‘You should not,’ she said. I smiled embarrassedly. From another table a man shouted ‘Why you laughing?’ I began to understand that my behaviour had seriously offended everyone around me. ‘You eat fish?’ asked the woman.