Waste not, want not

‘I want everyone to be as angry as I am,’ says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and I hope he succeeds for the thing that makes him so angry is one of the things that makes me most angry, too: the senseless eradication of the world’s fish stocks.

All this week on Channel 4, HF-W has been campaigning in a series of programmes called Hugh’s Fish Fight. In the first episode he set the scene nicely by going out with a trawler into the fishing grounds 80 miles off the north Scottish coast. There he was appalled to see the trawler haul in nets teeming with cod: appalled because every one of those cod had to be chucked back, dead, because the trawler had already exhausted its annual EU quota. An estimated one million tonnes of fish in the North Sea alone are wasted like this every year.

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‘But don’t you think there might be a sound conservation argument for these regulations?’ Hugh dutifully asked. The skipper shook his head. And he’s right. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to this disgraceful squander, except that it gives the EU bureaucrats and useless outfits like their fish-stock monitoring agency ICES the illusion that they are making a difference.

Apart from getting angry, mobilising his Dorset posse and getting lots more TV exposure — including a trip diving with manta rays in the Maldives: nice one, Hugh — HF-W’s most immediate solution to the problem was to persuade his audience to do their bit by eating fewer scarce fish (cod, tuna) and more sustainable fish.