Thursday 11 March 2021

Scale your brill and buy tinned whiting - God help us!

Spoiler Alert - It's not April the 1st! (though you might not believe it)


If it wasn't so serious, this new £200,000 advertising campaign from the Government urging the population to eat more fish would be funny - but it is not - funny that it is.

How can they get it this wrong?

For instance, the campaign material suggests:

    • you need to scale brill - brill don't have scales
    • you can buy tinned brill?
    • you can buy tinned whiting? 
    • you should keep Dover sole for a few days so the flesh becomes firm
    • you can buy Atlantic Wolf fish - there's never been one landed in Newlyn and  there will be only a handful of UK boats, if any, catch them on a regular basis
    • and you buy turbot, monkfish and scallops - well with a big enough food budget sure - buy most people to eat on a regular basis?
Obviously well intentioned but who or where on earth did they go to get their market research - let's hope it wasn't anyone at Seafish who are normally responsible for marketing fish in the UK who now, as a result of Brexit, are free to promote British fish in a way they were, so we were led to believe, unable to do while we were in the EU.

To dismiss the mistakes in this campaign as 'trivial' is an insult to all the fishermen and women who put their lives on the line every time they go to sea to put food on our plates. 'Tinned brill' my arse.

PS There's a prize for a photograph of tinned brill or whiting on a UK supermarket shelf - and no Photoshopping!