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Accessibilty Champion Steve Wilkinson on the importance of inclusion »With my fellow members of LEAF, I spent last Tuesday in the Lincoln area on a training day which included Grimsby Fish Market.
I now know a lot more about fish, sea fishing and the politics around bringing it ashore. None of this is a fisherman's tale other than in a very literal sense. I also can tell you there is something very fishy about celebrity chef recommended alternatives to cod and haddock which they say are from a more sustainable fish....pollocks indeed!
30,000tonnes of fish a year through Grimsby but only 20 small boats up against the dock walls. So where has our fishing fleet gone? The answer - as with many of our industries, including parts of farming - is that they have been off-shored! Thus there are plenty of cod in the sea it is just they have moved into waters off Iceland and the Faroe Islands because of water temperatures and the politics of the European fishing policy. Having heard where the fish is coming from to get to Grimsby and out to our supermarkets and fish bars I am no longer shifting to pollock as my fish species of choice. Indeed for several years I have been the painful man at the head of the queue in the chippie responding to the question from behind the chip shop counter "cod or haddock?" with the retort "which is more sustainable?"
The politics of offshore fishing is about as mad as mad gets - even worse than farming! There are 88,000 vessels of varying sizes in the EU of which 7,000 are from these islands and only 387 from our north east region. Thus most fish is imported in a very efficient way from more sustainable fishing grounds, luckily it has value added - especially the salmon, in Grimsby.
We saw a six year old cod and they really can grow very large - ie lots of chip shop portions! Halibut, we saw a big one in the auction and the week before one weighing 155lb(70KG) had been on sale. One of my LEAF farming friends had of course been eye to eye with one in Canada ten foot tall and nearly as wide....ho hum!
So having had an early morning call at 4.30am to get to see the fish before they were sold and been rewarded witha bacon butty - kedgeree would have been fine - we went to Doddington Hall to see a very interesting development of farm shop next to an Elizabethan Hall, heated with biomass wood. Next year we may all meet in the north east so I better get my skates on!
Ian
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