MONDAY 19 OCTOBER 2009 • SMALL PRINT AND SUSTAINABILITY
As
I have always championed ethical practice in agriculture, both as a
restaurateur and as a responsible citizen concerned about the sustainability of
our seafood, I applaud Charles Clover’s campaign and the launch of his new
website fish2fork.com, as featured in the article in the Sunday Times yesterday
(click here to read it)
Anything that calls attention to global over-fishing is to
be welcomed. However, this is a subject of great complexity.
For
example, Mr Clover’s website, while generously praising our food and ambience,
gives Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons the low rating of half a red fish skeleton,
indicating that we “served or appeared to serve endangered or overfished
species”. In fact, Le Manoir is at present the only Michelin-starred restaurant to have Marine Stewardship Council
full certification. We have buying policies to ensure that all the fish we
serve is from sustainable sources and is caught in an approved manner.
Moreover, we have regularly scheduled training sessions to ensure that all our
staff know and implement these policies. Our ultimate goal is to achieve full
traceability for all the ingredients we use.
Our guests come to our restaurant to enjoy themselves, not to hear or read a
sermon on sustainable fishing practices. Nonetheless, we refer to our MSC
certification on our menus, and go into some detail about it on the Le Manoir
website (indeed my own blog for 22 June featured news of Mr. Clover’s film, The
End of the Line).
What
campaigners sometimes fail to appreciate is that, when it comes to restricting
our menus to sustainable fish, chefs are only the gatekeepers, while the
wholesalers are the locksmiths. We work with Mike Berthet of M&J Seafoods (click here for the M&J Seafood website), who is equally
passionate about sustainability, to the extent of both offering sustainable
species such as gurnard, witches and megrims, and refusing to sell orange
roughy, shark and bluefin tuna to their 14,000 customers.
The
sheer complexity of the issues can be illustrated by the fact that the
fish2fork-linked Marine Conservation Society site gives Dover sole its maximum endangered-species
rating of 5, urging you not to buy, sell or eat Dover sole. Yet, in
near-contradiction, the small print says: “Ensure that your Dover sole is from
either the MSC certified fishery in Hastings, or the Celtic Sea, Skaggerak or Kattegat
regions as these stocks are considered healthy and are harvested sustainably”.
Of course it’s not helpful to people waging a campaign – a campaign, indeed,
that we support fully and vigorously – but in matters as complicated as what we
take from the bounty of our seas, it’s often the small print that matters the
most.
Update: 20 October:
True Stories - The End of the Line" documentary is being shown on More 4 tonight at 10pm. If you haven't given it much thought before now, I suspect you will having seen the documentary.
For more information on Le Manoir's fish purchasing policy, please click here
Update: 23 October:
Following the completion of the Fish2Fork questionnaire, and the
inclusion on both this website and Le Manoir's own website of our
policy on fish, we have now been awarded the top rating by Fish2Fork.
They have also written an article about our policy, which you can read
by clicking here