Loosely translated, the French name for the fish we’re looking at, vivaneau
bourgeois, likens it to a lively member of the middle classes. In
English we call it an imperial red snapper. Either way, there is undoubtedly
something rather grand about it.
Pink and rotund, it sits on Peter Lowman’s plate, baked in a garlic, ginger
and soy sauce marinade. By day, Loman is an engineering recruitment
specialist, but tonight he is glad he forked out on a fish cookery course at
Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, Raymond Blanc’s celebrated two Michelin
star-rated restaurant.
Lowman paid £45 for our fish: 4.85kg (10lb) of prime snapper that could easily
feed ten people. And like increasing numbers of people in the UK, he is
ready for a little experimentation. “Ten years ago there is no way this
would have been on my menu,” he says. “Then it would have been cod or
plaice, haddock or salmon. That was what we grew up with. But now — well,
the variety is endless.”
Seafood. For years, British thinking about fish has been clouded by a
depressing fog of word association: over-fishing, depleted stocks, dying
cod, mothballed trawlers. But now we are being encouraged to celebrate
rather than lament our lot. Because while harvests from our own waters have
been on the slide, a quiet revolution has been taking place, a sea-change
that has seen fish become a commodity traded as globally as wheat, oil or
gold.
Where once your fish came from a harbour just a few hundred miles away at
most, today it may have come from a vessel on the other side of the planet,
filmed as it was caught and individually chosen via satellite link by a chef
who will serve it to you tomorrow.
In spite of the gloom surrounding our own fish stocks, this year Britons will
eat more fish than ever before. In 2003 — the latest year for which figures
are available — we consumed 282,156 tonnes (277,700 tons) of seafood in the
UK, an increase of 41 per cent over ten years. When the figures for 2004
come out the quantity will be even higher.
So what is this revolution and how has it come about? To find out, we followed
our imperial red snapper on a 5,500km (3,400 miles) journey, from a busy
fish market in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to Peter Lowman’s home
outside Twickenham in southwest London.
Along the way we encountered a simple passion for freshness and quality — and
a pleasantly surprising level of concern for sustainability and fair trade.
The journey begins in Area 51, an Indian Ocean fishing zone, in the early
hours of February 6. It was here that the snapper was landed by handline
aboard a fishing boat from Dubai. In the chaos and colourful bustle of the
Dubai fish auction market, it is not possible to say exactly which fisherman
landed our snapper, but when Shashi Parapully, a 51-year-old native of
Kerala in south India, saw it, he wasted no time in placing a bid.
Parapully is a fish buyer, one of thousands around the world who have become
well versed in the increasingly varied tastes of the British consumer. He
works for Magenta International Trading, a fish importer and processor
operating in Dubai, India and the UK.
“The weather had been bad,” he says, “so the quantity and quality of the
catches was not good. But this batch was — I always look for quality, and
this was a quality catch. Because of the bad weather, the price at the
moment is high, around $9 (£4.70) a kilo for snapper. It’s usually around $5
or $6.”
In the past, Parapully’s fish would been consumed locally. Today, however,
because of advances in transport, refrigeration and information technology,
you can have it here. His boss, the importer who brought the fish to the UK,
is Kamal Desai. He takes up the story.
“Whether we are going to process the fish in our factories or fly it to the UK
as it is, there is no time to waste,” he says. “Advances in technology and
aviation allow us to do things today that we couldn’t do ten or 15 years
ago. Once we buy the fish, I have shipping agents in Dubai who get it on ice
and safely delivered to the airport. But first it must be inspected to
ensure that it is safe for human consumption, and there is export paperwork
to be filled in for various ministries in the UAE.
“That used to take up a lot of time, but today we apply over the internet and
we have our permission to export by the time the fish are ready to go. We
receive orders from fish merchants in the UK and have them boxed and
labelled with contents, date of catch, batch details and expiry date when we
put them on the plane.”
By now, the cost to the fish merchant is around £4 or £5 a kilo. Six and a
half hours later the cargo is landing at Heathrow, Gatwick or Manchester
airport, where it is again inspected by health officials before being
released to refrigerated lorries that deliver to fish markets.
In 1993 we imported 442,266 tonnes of seafood. In 2003 that figure was 520,736
tonnes, an increase of 18 per cent. With that increase has come a dazzling
array of new varieties. At Billingsgate fish market in East London, the
country’s largest, you can buy 143 kinds of fish on any given day. John
Rutherford, the chief executive of the UK’s Sea Fish Industry Authority,
says there are several reasons.
“In the 1960s we had a limited variety of fish available to us and, frankly,
much of it was of poor quality. Then came improvements in refrigeration, new
motorways and lower-cost air freight. And there was an explosion in foreign
travel, so you had an entire generation experiencing new varieties of
seafood on their holidays, and they wanted to try it at home.
“Add that to the growth of ethnic communities in the country, who wanted fish
from their home countries, and demand for exotic — or foreign — species rose
exponentially. And with new technology, the market is now global. I recently
heard of an Irish fisherman who filmed his catch and sent pictures by email
via a satellite link to a sushi restaurant in Tokyo. By the time the fish
was landed, it had been sold.”
The new demand for fish resulted in merchants casting their nets wider, and
improvements in air freight allowed that to happen. (Simple advances helped,
too. Airlines used to be reluctant to handle fish until Norwegian importers
invented leakproof foam boxes in the late 1980s).
In order to satisfy the increased demand, importers of frozen and processed
(known in the trade as “value-added”) seafood were as fast on their feet as
fresh fish importers. They now enjoy UK sales of more than £1 billion a year
and rising.
Wynne Griffiths, the chief executive of Young’s Bluecrest, the country’s
largest producer of processed and frozen foods, has a budget of £300 million
this year to spend on seafood that will be turned into some of Britain’s
favourite convenience foods (Young’s sells 12 million Admiral’s pies a year
— one every three seconds — and produces 40 per cent of all the seafood
consumed in the UK).
Griffiths buys 60 species from more than 30 countries. There is cod, haddock
and pollock from sustainable stocks in Alaska and North America, cold water
prawns from Norway, Iceland and the Faroe Isles, warm-water prawns from
Colombia, Thailand and Vietnam, hake from South Africa and Chile, and tuna
from Sri Lanka (in spite of the tsunami, Young’s and other buyers are doing
their best to stick by local fishermen).
“Most people in Britain don’t realise that we now source 80 per cent of our
non-farmed species from outside the EU,” he says. “Even when you look at
cod, the global catch is 800,000 tonnes and the UK consumes one quarter of
it. But the quota that can be landed from UK waters is just 18,000 tonnes.
We have to find the rest elsewhere.”
To do that, responsible companies such as Young’s, and all the big British
supermarket chains, source their fish from stocks certified by the Marine
Stewardship Council, a global, non-profitmaking body set up to safeguard
fishing stocks. More than 220 products in supermarkets now carry the MSC’s approved
logo.
Rupert Howes, the MSC’s chief executive says: “Seventy-five per cent of world
fish stocks are either fully exploited, depleted or in a state of fragile
recovery. More than 200 million people worldwide rely on fish for employment
in a $100 billion industry. For those reasons, we see it as our
responsibility to safeguard fish stocks for future generations.
“We have been up and running for only eight years, but already 5 per cent of
the global capture is covered by our certification scheme, and that’s
growing all the time. To a large extent, our growth will be consumer-driven
— if customers demand sustainable fish and buy products with our logo, then
fisheries will be forced to behave more responsibly.”
By now, our snapper has arrived, in darkness, at Billingsgate Market and is
being unpacked by Roger Barton, a fish merchant for 44 years and known in
the market as a workaholic (he also works as a bookmaker at Romford dog
track). His day begins at 1am and continues into the afternoon as he phones
suppliers, looking for the best price and quality for the next day’s stock.
At Billingsate you may find abalone from France or Australia (at £40 a kilo,
the king of shellfish), Jamaican red tilapia (£4.50 a kilo), or pink sea
bream from Oman (£5.50). And there are emperor fish, groupers, monkfish,
John Dory, skate, hoki, eels, char, barramundi, croakers — the list is
seemingly endless.
“You have to have a good list of importers to make sure that you have fish to
sell — just because the weather has been bad in one place doesn’t mean that
you don’t sell that variety,” says Barton. “You have to find it from
somewhere else or your customers will go elsewhere. If you run a restaurant
and want a certain type of fish for your menu tomorrow, I have to hit the
phone and make sure that I can get it.
“There is no difference now between this place and the trading floor of a
stock exchange. Fish is a global commodity these days and it’s our job to
buy and sell it.”
Not all buyers go to the fishmarket for their stocks. Mike Berthet, the
purchasing director of M&J Seafoods, the country’s largest suppliers to
the catering trade, goes abroad and buys the fish himself. And with a buying
budget of £35 million, he sometimes makes new markets of his own.
“I’ve just been to Ecuador to look for new varieties and I’ve come up with
corvina, a fish with a nice meaty flesh like sweet sea bass,” he says. “We
always work with local experts to ensure sustainability, fair trade and good
working conditions. And all the varieties must be MSC-certified. Even then,
if I’m not satisfied about the sustainability of some certified fish, I
won’t buy them.”
Our fish is nearly almost at the end of its journey and, according to Barton,
it is now worth £28. It has been bought by Ray Sandys, a Twickenham
fishmonger and chairman of the London Fishmongers’ Association, who retired
last month after 48 years (his son, Stuart, is carrying on the business).
“I have seen a lot of changes, and I have to say they are for the better as
far as the consumer is concerned,” he says. “Take squid, for example. Ten
years ago I never sold it for human consumption; it was for bait. But now it
goes for £9.50 a kilo as a delicacy. I never sold tuna or swordfish. It was
cod and haddock, trout and skate. Now our customers are more adventurous and
we give them the best variety we can.
“People are busy these days, so we descale and fillet fish if people want
that. And they seem to appreciate it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so
optimistic about the future of the fish trade.”
Peter Lowman has now bought the snapper but, like many consumers, he’s anxious
that it comes from sustainable stocks and that the fisherman is fairly
treated.
According to Helen Davies, the fisheries policy officer for the World Wide
Fund for Nature, he needn’t worry too much. The WWF helped to set up the MSC
and she is satisfied that all the major buyers in Britain are playing by the
rules.
“There are some concerns about European fleets, mainly from France and Spain,
fishing where they shouldn’t off the coast of West Africa, but by and large
buyers have learnt from our own mistakes and they take stewardship very
seriously,” she says. In particular, she is satisfied that companies such as
Sainsbury, Unilever (the owner of Birds Eye Foods) and Young’s are doing
their bit to source from sustainable stocks.
So, all that remains is for Lowman to serve up his imperial red snapper. And
his verdict? It was a meal fit for an emperor.
NOW COOK IT
