Ethical Food Futures

3/4 of our fish stocks are being overfished and things are getting worse some scientists are predicting disaster in the next 40 years if we don't act now even our politicians admit that Europe's Fisheries policy is a mess we don't have time if we don't make changes we will lose one fish stock after the other so 6 months ago I decided to leave the comfort of river Cottage behind and go on a journey to find out what is really going on at the industrial end of our fisheries and what I found out is that things are not just bad they're mad I think I just saw 90 plus% of all that beautiful fish go over the side dead the DN disgrace I wanted to do something about it but I knew I couldn't do much on my own and here on this beach today we start a campaign how many of you are going to get behind that campaign this is the story of how a huge number of you joined our fish fight campaign and of all the amazing and unexpected things that happened as a result the question is the motion on the order paper as many as are of that opinion say I I absolutely reiterate the massive congratulations of du to Tesco for a very bold decision and if we keep up the pressure is uh anyone from John West here today together we could actually change European fishing policy before it's too [Music] late Hugh firstly for people who may not have seen the series can you just recap briefly on what you set out to do with that program sure well I love fish I think it's one of the greatest foods on our planet I'd be surprised if there was anyone here who didn't love tucking into a really beautifully cooked piece of fresh fish I love to catch it I love to cook it I love to eat it I love to feed it to my family and uh I love to serve it at our cookery school and on the menu in our restaurants but I think we all have to face up to the fact that the future of fish is highly uncertain and this is what I set out to look into in these series and obviously we needed some sort of rationale for looking at this very major problem so we took the three most popular fish in the UK uh and it's a popularity that's reflected around the world not necessarily the the most popular in every country but you'll recognize the names Cod salmon and tuna one sea that was once abundant off our own Shores still fished there very heavily but in a lot of trouble stocks on the point of collapse that's Cod tuna which we import from tropical waters all over the world mainly tined and we then consume in vast quantities the sandwich uh stalls all over the UK and salmon the the great farmed fish of these uh North Atlantic Waters both here in Scandinavia and around the coast of Scotland we decided we had to get to the bottom of what were the fundamental sustainability problems of these three fish and that would perhaps start to tell us where were going wrong and how we might set off on a new footing to try and have a better relationship with fish the other thing that really motivated me was that people marine biologists ecologists NOS looking into these problems kept telling me that this is a fixable problem it's one of the great fixable environmental problems we have climate change that's a really really tough one looking after the fish in the sea so we take out only sustainable numbers I'm not saying it's easy but it's definitely doable and the World Bank has actually uh calculated that if the Seas oceans were sustainably managed carefully managed so that the brood stocks were allowed to recover we could within a very short time have a marine Harvest worth5 billion dollar more than it is today so the sea still has an incredible potential to feed us and contribute to our health and of course our happiness as as as satisfying our appetites for for one of the it is one of the the foods for which I think omami aside we have a great appetite and there's some really important uh evolutionary history in that we are who we are because we learned to eat fish there's even one theory that we were went through a semi- aquatic phase and lost the hair on our bodies because we spent so much time waste Deep in water leaning over to pick out shellfish or spear fish and it certainly accounts for the extraordinary development of our brains over a short period of time and I think about that every time I feed fish to my kids I wouldn't want to be in a world where I couldn't give them this wonderful healthy food so packed with Omega-3s so we looked at all these problems we looked at tuna and the way that supermarkets were mislabeling it uh and making bogus environmental claims about the methods being used there were two biggest branded Tins in the UK had a totally meaningless statement on them which said uh Tesco or princes two big Brands is fully committed to methods of fishing that protect the marine environment and its species it's a sort of bogus and circular claim particularly considering they were using pering and with a massive by catch of sharks and juveniles Turtles and other unwanted species so we challenged them we said take that claim off your tin or start putting Poland Line tuner in the tin and they've made a commitment to uh both of them have made a commitment to Source uh at least half their tin Tuna from Poland line Fisheries by 2015 and that statement is no longer on either of those tins the great European problem we decided to face up to is this crazy byproduct of cfp common Fisheries policy legislation which is the Staggering amount of perfectly fine edible fish that is thrown over the sides of boats because it doesn't fit uh within the rigors of the quota system and I I knew about this and made me feel uneasy for a long time as I think many chefs who had heard about discards felt the same way but I had no idea of the scale for example I didn't know that over half the fish by number were being thrown back into the North Sea troll trolled fish from the troller fishery amounting to over half a million tons of fish not all of it edible but lots of what I saw going over the side Prime cod cod like this huge KY on one Hall alone I a boat I was on through over qua Ki Whiting uh and cod over the side that I calculated would have fed 2,000 people so you know 10 times as many as we are nearly 10 times as many as we are here in that Tent today from one Hall of fish didn't fit with the quota system had to go over the side so we went out there got the shots came back put a show together threw it out online with a a great campaign uh for which I'm hugely indebted to a really talented team and the response was extraordinary by the end of the night of the transmission of the first program we had over 200,000 signatures and by the end of the series run we had over half a million and we now have over 87,000 people signed up to the fish fight campaign not just from the UK but from all over Europe and we particularly launched the campaign uh in Spain and Poland and Germany and and and countries where we fight where we really feel that there's a huge opportunity to raise Consciousness uh on this issue and it's still unresolved 18 months later we've got to the point where a discards ban has been proposed at the European level uh it's survived a number of uh tough talking sessions uh in Brussels and Luxembourg and it could become ratified legislation by November of this year if we continue to push that might happen so I'm still hoping that some of you here today will feel interested enough and uh excited enough that you can do something about this problem so maybe have a look at our website maybe sign up a lot of you have your own followers on Twitter for your restaurants and the work that you do and it would be great if you could uh give our campaign a bit of a shout because we need to keep going all the way all the way till we get over the line so that's kind of where we are 18 months later it's been extraordinary time for me I had no idea what I was letting myself in for Brussels and Luxemburg are not my favorite places to hang out anyone know any good restaurants in anyway anyone here from Brussels let me come and eat with you next time uh so that was the that that's where we're at with the campaign I just want to take you back to the very start of filming because I've read somewhere that you decided you wanted to do a series about fish you hadn't you know you hadn't completely narrowed it down to what the series became but you said that once you had spent those first 24 hours on the Scottish troller it just became so apparent and I just want to talk talk a little bit about the surprise that you felt after that first day because that surprise that passion that anger really comes across in your in your series it was an extraordinary 24 hours on this troll out of scrabster um was just a regular fishing trip for for these guys and they were coming I mean we we went out there knowing it was towards the end of the quter and that they would be grappling with the discards problem and let me let me be very clear fishermen hate throwing away fish they go out to sea to bring back fish it's a dangerous job uh they do it out of a passion in many cases out of a uh determination to be out there at Sea and to bring back a food that they believe in and the idea to them that they have to throw a lot of this away is anathema and yet it's been part of their business for so long uh that it has it's part of the the whole system so much so that the the way the fish are processed on the boat is that the fish go along a conveyor belt inside the uh below decks where where they're pulled out some species are gutted some are put straight on Ice just depends how the how the fish is going to go back to port and basically anything that isn't part of your quota catch or that you're not planning to land and sell just stays on that conveyor belt you don't have to sort of agonize over you don't have to put it in a bin you it just stays on the conveyor belt and what's on the conveyor belt just drops out of the side of the boat and goes back into the sea so on this particular on these particular Halls where they'd finished their quter of cod they were hoping to catch some hadock they'd finished their quter of Ki they were after monks and Brill and flatties but it's a mixed fishery and you can't put signs on your net saying no Cod today please sadly um so they were discarding a huge amount of fish and but but not really having to confront the issue of how much was going over the side but I saw that they were picking out maybe one in every 10 or 20 fishes and the rest was going over and then on the next tour my uh director had an idea he said let's just ask them to put all the fish that they would throw over the side into fish baskets instead of letting it go down the Chute so we stopped the shoot every we stopped the shoot took all the fish that they weren't allowed to land into fish baskets moved it along until they the fish from just won one five hour Hall on one troller that's all it was and we had these 24 baskets of beautiful Prime fish which we took up onto the deck and and looked at and I and I talked to the guys and it it made them see everything in in a new light you know they they hadn't had to confront the W the the waste for so long it had been automated waste and I for me that was an incredibly intense moment moment and I I I felt at that point we had uh we had a story for our documentary and we also had the beginnings of a campaign because I thought who in their right mind could watch that fish being tipped over into the sea and and think that that is a workable policy uh it's a very complicated business uh choosing fish for a restaurant in a sustainable way uh almost impossible to get right all the time uh but it's something we've been trying to engage with for a long time and I think that everyone here has an opportunity to spread that uh sense of responsibility to all who they engage with with food and that's I hope one of the opportunities of these next couple of days is the the amazing things that we're hearing and the amazing opportunities to share that and spread that just in terms of that you uh and we'll go to the audience after this uh this question you've been working in the kind of Vanguard of of campaigns about food now for for more than 10 years do you feel that the kind of feeling on the ground is changing that more and more people are open to the ideas that you you and other people are talking about because everybody knew about the European fish policy for the last 10 20 30 years nobody did anything about it I I think um there's a huge there's a much much greater awareness in in in the restaurant trade um the multinational companies that that I mean the biggest fishmongers in in Europe now are supermarkets and they are the ones who have the the biggest power but in the end supermarkets will listen to their customers and some of the information that customers take when they go shopping their supermarkets is from the the the the food they they've heard about the the chefs they admire the the cooking they like that some of that does stick and one of the most encouraging things I've had the mind-blowingly wonderful experience on Friday night of sitting down at at NoMa and eating a lot of wild food a lot of uh very carefully grown food I didn't gorge on protein in that in that extraordinary number of courses and that uh massively diverse Feast uh we didn't pile through great chunks of Meat and Fish we had delicate morsels lovingly prepared uh intensely put together uh with the kind of care that we've been hearing about so far all morning and it was wonderful and it made me think uh the this is possible uh right back to the first Speaker today tour told us uh there's a lot of wonderful food out there we don't have to get uh monom maniacally obsessed with either protein or starch from just a few uh sources we can spread our Nets a little wider and the burden on the earth can be a little less uh than it currently is and I think that message is is getting through and I think we have a a greater volume of ethically aware and sustainably aware consumers now than ever before but fighting against that we also have an expanding global population but I think we we you we're often told that the problem is not food availability the problem is food distribution and frankly also methods of production and food sustain stability ultimately is food ethics because if we tear the world apart in pursuit of short profits from uh shortterm investment crops uh we're get we we are heading towards a massive crisis at some point and it's so important that everyone who regards food as anything other than a fuel and frankly even those who see it only as that except uh that there that there massive changes that are are needed now in in food production across the world okay let's open it to questions from the audience can we get some lights on the yes we can and we've got a question up here and a question in the middle after that it's actually one question with three parts but what is better than the quota system and should boats go out at shorter lengths of time um there obviously fishing too much and what do the authorities say the governing bodies say in the UK um when you present to them the amount of fish that's being thrown overboard what do they say to you well our Fisheries minister in the UK Richard benan has been absolutely clear that he wants to see the elimination of discards and I think most people would say elimination of discards or massive reduction of discards you cannot claim to be conserving fish stock if you are throwing half a million tons of good fish overboard but you've raised the qu thank you you've raised the question how are we going to do it and ending uh just Banning discards without any thought to adjusting the quota system is going to cause a lot of problems and we have to anticipate those problems and work with them uh the main changes have to come from selectivity of gear and the way in which fish are targeted because at the moment the system allows fishermen to catch anything and then land according to the quota system so their motivation ultimately and and you know financially times are very tough for these boats so it's entirely understandable is to come back with a hold full of Maximum value fish and this has led to Crazy versions of discarding for example High grading when you've still got Cod quota left and you're targeting Cod and you're catching Cod but every Cod below 3 kilos is being thrown back because a Cod of three kilos is worth slightly more in the market per kilo quite a bit more 50 P to a power more the bigger the fish the bigger the price per kilo so there's a strong motivation for only catching the bigger fish and that could mean that that you're putting away 70 80 90% of the Cod you catch even when you've got Cod quota High grading the high grading version of discards was made illegal in in the North Sea uh I think I think three years ago now or two years ago now but it still happens every day because there is not the will for enforcement and there is the the the fear of of bankruptcy on the part of fishermen working under that system so we need a wholesale change of approach and and the first thing is to be much more successful at targeting the fish that we can land for a price we don't want to transfer a problem of discards at Sea into a problem of of of stinking rotting discard fish on land if we are going to bring in some over quota fish and I and I think it will be inevitable that that happens we need to make sure it's not wasted so that that that is most marketable I mean Norway have done it they have a version of this system and the over quota fish that comes in is divided broad it's a little more complicated this but broadly into two categories the least value fish go for fish meal the the more higher value edible fish uh the fishermen are paid a handling fee not enough have to motivate them to want to catch that fish but then that fish is distributed into non-competitive markets it goes to schools and uh uh and hospitals and things like that so there is there are ways of doing this and they all have their problems and they will all have their critics and there are many many people who are pointing out the possible uh problematic consequences of implementing a discards ban and I don't deny for a moment that there will be those problems but I do Den deny absolutely that we have a right to take whatever we like out of the sea and throw away what we can't use not because we actually not because we can't use it but because some crazy legislation that was cooked up in Brussels a couple of decades ago makes it obligatory to do that that is not Fish Conservation it never will be and it'll never be sustainable and it has to stop okay we okay okay somebody add their hand up got just one thing I want to add to that there are some extraordinary sustainable systems and if you want to find out um about one of them Dan Barber who's here talking later today done a fantastic Ted talk about the the fish he fell in love with and fell out of love with and an amazing aquaculture system in Spain so we we have to embrace these Solutions but they have to be environmentally sound and ultimately uh built- on ecosystems that will last so that so it has to be an ecosystems based approach not not a uh simply a fish numbers approach sorry back your question yeah I'd like to first of all congratulate the the speaker for his passion and it's a it's a wonderful approach um but two things um have there been any change in the type of Nets that are used when you have gone aboard these ships uh We've talking about we've touched on gear Gear changing we could use that in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense um the the industry has done many uh very excellent pilots and demonstrations of the efficiency of of using more selective gear in allowing a lot of by catch or potential discards to escape the Nets um but then they are not then obliged to follow up on that and the process of piloting New Gear has to a degree become uh window dressing uh for the industry and it needs to now be properly embraced and what we're hoping is that the one of the chain effects of a discard span will be that fishermen will be highly motivated not to bring in fish that they can't uh profit from and that that will actually provide the Tipping Point but by goodness need some financial help with that we know the EU is a wash with money and it spent some of it so badly in pursuit of so many Mis misguided goals including in the Realms of fishery but helping fishermen to gear up with more selective ultimately more sustainable gear would be an incredibly good way to spend a few uh tens of millions of of of euros and and that this is what has to happen it has to be a supportive change for the industry because we all as I said at the beginning we all want to go on eating fish such a fantastic food well we can but there's one question that comes in all questions of conservation and that is the stress of a sustainable population and a sustainable family yeah it is it is stressful it is difficult it's a it's it's a huge challenge but we have to make some wholesale changes okay we've got a a question down here towards the front in part you already answered the question was about farming is farming part of the solution or of the problem and the other one is about consumption should we pay more for fish um technically two questions but we'll let you away with that aquaculture is has to be uh part of the solution such as the demand for fish uh that it it's here already it's not it's not going to go away but of course it's part of the problem because most of the species that we're farming need to be fed they're carnivorous and they need to be fed on fish so we are actually feeding a lot of very fantastic edible fish uh to some fish that are ultimately easier to package and easier for the multinationals to sell so we're turning millions of tons of Peru Peruvian ancheta into farmed salmon because people like to buy a boneless fill it in a in a cellophane pack was a again the theme of the earlier talk instead of reaching out to discover with our appetites how wonderful and beautiful these little anies are we're hoovering them up desiccating them into powder making them into pellets and feeding them to other fish that one part of the food Community finds easier to deal with because they don't like little fish with small bones so that is a big cultural problem that that that that needs to be addressed and it's something that the Brits probably most guilty of all we like our fish to come in fat fillets except when it's white bait of course which is horrendous from a sustainability point of view because it's actually the baby fish of a whole load of different pelagic species sprats on the other hand now that's an adult fish anv is that size that's an adult fish and actually these massive Shing pelagic fish ultimately are the ones that have the capacity to feed great ways of Humanity on the planet if they're managed in a sustainable way mackerel there's always a problem with Lo loading onto a new species and giving that species the status of the hopeful sustainable alternative mackerels are a great and frustrating example I a couple of years ago I was telling everyone we should all be eating more mackerel we should be doing uh mackerel fillet sandwich hot mackerel fet sandwich lightly battered with some SATA sauce in a soft Bap in every fish and chip shop in the UK um it's not because of that campaign that this has happened but now only a few months ago the Marine Stewardship Council decided to withdraw their certification of Northeast Atlantic mackerel basically because the EU and Norway can't agree with Iceland and the Pharaoh Islands of how much of this extraordinary abundance of mackerel if we could only restrict our appetite for Northeast Atlantic mackerel to a mere 650 tons thousand sorry 650,000 tons a year it would be sustainable but no we insist on taking out 750 850 this year close to a million tons of mackerel and that's pushing it over the edge we've got a special request uh from Rene who wants to ask the last question to you and I think under the circumstances it would be rude not to allow Rene to do that so um Hume I was just like you know I'm I'm a cook I've I went to school I I learned you know the technique of a bernes nobody tells you about these things here so you know do you think it's important for the cooks that they are the ones that sort of know these things and and take part of this I I do Renee I do because we we we have an opportunity to and therefore we must it's as simple as that and if and other people are not doing it as best they can and I'm it's not I'm not saying it's the moral duty of every cook to bang on about sustainability on their menu at every opportunity uh but it is an opportunity and and those of us who believe in the future of good cooking and the future of using wild food I mean we've talked about wild plants and the abundance out there fish are not farmed generally the the the ones we're eating most of at the moment they are wild taken out of the sea and we there's a big issue in in in all our relationships with uh killing animals to to provide food and I see it as ultimately a kind of contract it's not not an original idea to me but but I've read about this and thought about this and I think it's roughly right in the same way that we have a a contract of good husbandry for every farm animal we raise on this planet which says I will look up after you when you're alive I will feed you what you want to eat I will give you even some bonuses I'll give you I'll give you uh excellent uh maternity care and try really hard to make sure your Offspring don't die uh when you're sick I'll make you better but most of all I'll allow you to do what your instincts tell you you want to do the whole time you're on the planet if I fulfill that obligation maybe I can make a case for slaughtering you uh at an immature age I'm feeding you to my friends but if I break that contract then the deal is completely off if I shut you up in a tiny barn and let you die of thirst or let 10% of you die of thirst or 10% of you die of a heart attack from obesity or whatever the problems particular problems of intensive farming mortality may be may be I've broken that deal and I think we have a similar deal with with the oceans and it's to keep the oceans fundamentally healthy if we're going to continue to extract vast quantities of edible protein also known as fish also known as animals from that sea okay uh I think you'll agree that you [Applause] has okay [Applause] I have one more question oh he's the boss and a quick answer will the world become more delicious as well I think everything tastes more delicious if you feel good about where it's come from I think that is the true meaning of providence and it's why it's why there are no long longer any great chefs in the world who don't care about Providence the two that those two things are now incompatible and that is a very good thing