Consumers all at sea trying to navigate fish guide
Despite EU regulations requiring labelling on both loose and packaged fish, many consumers find the details lacking or unintelligible, making environmentally sustainable options more difficult to find.
The dilemma for those who want to keep the pressure off vulnerable species arises as environmentalists in Britain equip consumers with a guide to what seafood they should if they want cuisine with a conscience.
Britain’s Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has published a booklet detailing 150 fish commonly available to consumers in Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe, and rating them from one to five with one being the best to choose and five warning that the species is in peril.
More fall into the latter category with 69 falling into the most endangered group and just 46 being cleared to eat without worry, but the guide rules out very few species completely as often it is not the type of fish but where it was caught that makes the difference.
For example, it is recommended that herring from the west of Ireland or Scotland be avoided but its Norwegian variety can be enjoyed in abundance. Hake from southern Europe is also rated a category five but fans of the fish are given the all-clear to eat stocks from South Africa.
If consumers aren’t confused enough by the geography, they can be totally mystified by the labelling codes.
“All fish is meant to be labelled, and there are several facts that are supposed to be on all labels,” Ray Ellard of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland explained.
“The name of the fish species, the name in Latin if its available, whether it’s farmed and if so, the country of origin; or, if it’s been caught, then the catch area. But the catch area can be something like FAO 27 — which is the code for the North East Atlantic — so that may not be very useful for the average consumer.”
The FSAI’s main concern of course is the safety of the food to eat, not its environmental impact, so the codes are geared more towards tracing batches back to source if they are responsible for an outbreak of food poisoning.
In the case of fish farmed in Ireland, the tracing codes are down to a fine art. A piece of farmed salmon can be traced back to the day it formed as an egg and where its mother spawned.
But for the average Irish consumer with a conscience, who is faced with a choice of imported seafood worth €200 million here each year and just wants to be sure they haven’t eaten the last living specimen of an endangered species, information is less readily available.
BIM, the Irish sea fisheries board, have steered away from trying to produce an all-encompassing guide like the Marine Conservation Society’s, mainly because fish stocks change constantly.
But Mr Ellard said consumers should speak up if they have questions.
“We’d always encourage people to ask about their food. Change is often a response to consumer demands,” he said.
lFor more information log ont to www.mscuk.org, www.fishonline.org or www.bim.ie.
