Waitrose is set to remove mackerel from its shelves amid escalating concerns over unsustainable fishing practices.
The retailer said that it is the first major UK supermarket to suspend sourcing of the popular fish.
It said that fresh, chilled, and frozen mackerel, primarily sourced from Scottish waters, will be unavailable to shoppers by 29 April. Tinned varieties will follow once the current stock is depleted.
I used to refer to the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide on the odd occasion I’d eat fish. Back then I remember mackerel being sustainable, sadly that is no longer the case as the guide for mackerel now says:
Most mackerel sold in the UK needs improvement because of long-term overfishing. Avoid mackerel caught using gillnets.
This is very useful, thanks for sharing it!
That guide is interesting. Only lists brown crab though and no others, is that just because the others are unpopular enough to not really matter?
Also feel like it should be easier to legally catch invasive species to eat, salt water fine as you can just turn up without permission or permits but fresh water you need to do a bunch of paperwork to bother catching invasive crayfish. Make it easy for anyone to eat the invasive species to extinction!
Whilst I welcome the change, my corporate paranoia hat wonders if they’re actually doing this because they’ve peeked into the future and suddenly sprouted a conscience, or, if their suppliers are coming up with empty nets already and the retailers are shifting the focus away from themselves by saying “see? we told you it was unsustainable”
Man, I’ve always had negative opinions on “conspiracy theory” nuts, who are a bit too skeptical about everything… but these days… I feel I might be becoming one.
It’s either that - or I am becoming aware of how messed up the world is. So maybe I’m not paranoid, but just painfully aware of “the system.”
Ignorance truly is bliss. It’s stressful to always have thoughts like the one you’re presenting.
Once you realise that most of humanities laws are written after a bad event and not before, and that companies would rather spend millions of dollars on PR instead of fixing a problem, the tinfoil hat starts to grow in.
None of what I wrote above is true 100% of the time, but occurs an undefined X% of the time that I’m primed to
Salmon next, please. Shut down the horrendous Salmon farms.
This is about sustainability, presumably farming salmon is sustainable.
Salmon farms have an appalling impact on the sustainability of wild salmon, so no
https://theweek.com/culture-life/food-drink/the-dark-side-of-salmon-farming
Oh, thanks for linking that
Concerning, it’s one of the few food stuffs with very high naturally occurring levels of Vitamin D. Other major sources of it are either a lot more expensive (like Tuna or Salmon - sardines being an exception but ewww) or are usually fortified and likely processed and refined.
We really need as much Vitamin D as we can get in the UK! Can’t just survive on chips, however much I wish that were the case.
Just taking foods off the shelf isn’t sustainable. They key here is substitution. Change mackerel, for billionaires, and spaceship earth move one giant step towards sustainability.
