Well past the half million and counting!

Today the FishFight campaign signatures sailed past the half million mark. The downside of all the publicity is that Channel 4s fishy week has brought to the attention of the public at large a whole host of issues - not all directly related to the more local concerns of quotas and discards that have great consequences for the fleet should future controls be born of sentiment and not sense.

While many viewers may have found the scenes from last night's Gordon Ramsay shark fest which investigated the finning of sharks for shark fin soup somewhat gory - the truth of the matter is that slaughtering animals - be they fish, foul or beast hardly makes for palatable tea-time TV - but that is what goes on the whole world over in order to provide protein for much of the population.

Today, Education and the National Curriclum does not help students to engage with food either -in schools today cookery lessons have now been replaced with 'Design and Food Technology' - dissociated from getting your hands dirty and about as far removed from the real world of cake making, baking, roasting, mincing, chopping and preparing food for the table as it gets - instead students are fed a text of terms and processes more akin to the production manual you might imagine guided the staff of any multi-national food factory production line churning out cakes, sausages of meat pies by the million. 

A sanitised curriculum won't help future generations be objective about the life and death of livestock or fish for human consumption - especially when many recent school initiatives have been sponsored by the huge multi-nationals that rule our supermarket shelves - just look up Nestlé and their part in sales of baby milk powder in third world countries over the most natural of feeding process's enjoyed by the offspring of every single one of the world's mammals - its mother's milk.

Here's the kind of resources made available to the teaching world in support of today's curriculum - maybe, just maybe it would be better if the focus was on knowing, understanding, selecting, preparing and cooking real food to such an extent that kids made their own choices based on first hand experience so that teachers did not feel it necessary to be spend time addressing the negativee aspects of our eating habits and consumerism.

Shark fin soup.

Last night's concluding screening as part of Channel 4's very fishy week saw chef Gordon Ramsay confronting those boats and merchants involved in shark finning - the practice of removing the fins from sharks then to be used for the hugely popular Asian dish, shark fin soup -  not something carried out by the boats landing to Newlyn of course.......

dorsal fins, like in the picture above, according to the programme, are worth 18 times as much per kilo as the rest of the shark's body - many of the boats, rather than saving the whole carcass would simply dump the body of the shark rather than use up fuel, ice and space in the fishroom dealing to keep them aboard and simply landed the fins. Similarly, where sharks are caught in big numbers as a by catch the bodies are seldom retained on board.

A Thai tourism web site has carried an article pleading with visitors to Thailand not to eat Shark Fin soup in an attempt to cut down demand since 2001. This traditional Asian dish is often served at weddings, banquest and special occasions and has therefore become a part of cultural activity - something that is then difficult to change - a bit like saying that fattening turkeys for Christmas is now banned and asking people to celebrate Christmas dinner with an alternative.

The netters have their day.

Early supplies speed their way to the western-most supermarket in the UK......

heavy overnight rain has the Coombe river at full flood......

under Roger's watchful gaze the sorting job is nearly done......

just in time for the buyers to get on with trading over the end-to-end net fish.......

some of whom will pay top prices for boxes of quality fish from inshore boats like the Regina Maris.......

and prime examples of Cornish cod beginning to show on the grounds........

still more boxes of pollack - Hugh would be pleased.......

down the pontoon berths it's all lights and action aboard the St Ives cat Midnight Express.......

while the crabber Emma Louise has her lights on and is ready to sail......

opposite the fish market, you just never know what will turn up next in the shop window of Waghorns.

Nearly there!

Monday should see the FishFight campaign top half a million signatures!

Profile Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall - courtesy of today's Guardian.

The Guardian today provides as closer look at the man behind the FishFight campaign. From Eton to 'eatitall', as he became known after his first TV series, 'A Cook on the Wild Side'.


A quote from the article provides some thought for where HF-W's next battle may take him!

"The venerable Prue Leith has dedicated years to campaigning for improvements in the nutritional standards of school dinners only to be fobbed off; it took an Essex boy and self-styled "shit-stirrer" on terrestrial TV to jolt the government into action. Similarly Greenpeace, Charles Clover and many others have been on the offensive over tuna, heinous fishing methods and discards but it has taken our floppy-haired toff to really bring the issue to the fore and gain some concessions.

Unencumbered by any endorsement deals with supermarkets, Fearnley-Whittingstall is free to give big business a going over. One wonders what will be his next target."

All will be revealed shortly no doubt.

Dispatches - 7.05pm tonight on Channel 4.

Dispatches investigates the fish sold on Britain's high street to find out where it is sourced, how it is processed and what is actually in it, as Channel 4 News presenter Alex Thomson unwraps one of the nation's favourite dishes.

Through DNA testing Thomson discovers the fish in fish and chips may not be quite as advertised and exposes how one major supermarket is misleading consumers about the sustainability of the cod it sells.

The apparent health benefits of fish have driven demand from consumers and made it a lucrative multi-billion-pound industry in the UK. But Thomson reveals the chemical additives used in some fish products.

He also uncovers that packaged fish on sale in the chilled section of the supermarket may have been frozen for nine months before it's defrosted and sold to consumers, some of whom assume this is fresh.

Dispatches also goes undercover to investigate the prawn industry in Bangladesh, which supplies Britain with several thousand tonnes of prawns each year, and finds a dangerously unregulated industry. Secret filming reveals serious hygiene issues and the use of a widely banned pesticide to combat disease in prawn ponds. The report also exposes how prawns are injected with a dirty bulking liquid to increase weight and profit.

Come on Newlyn!

It seems that the Brixham Boys enjoyed a bumper year in 2010 - Brixham Trawler Agents - who operate the independent fish auction have just announced that last year the port saw £24,000,000 million pounds worth of fish pass through the market- that means that Newlyn can no longer call itself England's number one fishing port!


Last week saw three boats in Newlyn gross 150,000 between them - but let us not forget that there are still a significant number high grossing boats that continue to land their fish away to Plymouth and France.  Newlyn must do what it takes to bring the fish from these boats back across the market floor - the market need that fish to keep port viable for the future and they need to pay for those new fenders!