Sustainable. Seafood. Two words that go together, often with a set of proud motherhood statements like ‘caring for our oceans’, or ‘responsibly fished’. Well, I can tell you, from the research I’ve been doing for What’s The Catch? (starting on SBS ONE from Thursday 30 October at 8.30pm) sustainable seafood is a minefield. Dig down into the studies and you’ll find precious little hard data on many species that includes exactly when, how and where they breed. Let alone how best to manage them. Mostly it’s guesswork,albeit informed guesswork much of the time. Australia, it must be said, does contain some of the better managed fisheries in the world. But it’s what we don’t know that is often the problem.
What I do know – in brief – is that it is far better to eat seafood from the bottom end of the food chain – it’s simple biology. So seaweed is better than a crab. A mussel is better than a fish. A small, fast-growing fish is better than a large carnivorous fish, which could well be four or five rungs up the ladder in terms of what it’s eaten.
As I grew up, and learned to cook, I did what many of us Australians did with seafood. I only ate fillets. From big, relatively tasteless white fish. I thought of sardines as bait. I avoided octopus and shellfish. And I did no favours to the ocean as I did so. Yet cooking smaller fish, shellfish even, is no great chore. Eating them is a joy that I’ve learned from cultures besides my own. And there’s a certain feeling of satisfaction that comes from eating this seafood with a totally clear conscience.
Photography Alan Benson.
As seen in Feast magazine, October 2014, Issue 36.
