Are you being served good fish or bad?

From Charles Cover and the rest of the End of the Line team comes another way to exercise your purchasing power as a consumer to support sustainable fisheries with their new website fish2fork.com. On the site you can search restaurants by name and location and view their good or bad fish rating: blue fish (up to 5) represent marks for sustainably sourced fish, whereas red fish (again up to 5) indicate the establishment’s menu may include endangered fish species. The site has got the ball rolling with a list of 100 restaurants and is now trying to get the public involved by providing their own reviews of restaurants they have visited, either opting to ‘pat a chef on the back’ or ‘rat on a restaurant’.

Alarmingly 7 out of 25 Michelin-starred restaurants visited were serving species listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. However, the campaign appears to already be having an effect, with landmark London restaurants J Sheekey and Scott’s having moved from negative red fish ratings into the blue fish zone. Nonetheless, these red/blue fish ratings aren’t as clear cut as black and white: the caviar from one of these restaurants is now classed as sustainable due to being from farmed sturgeon as opposed to wild sturgeon. Although the target fishery may be demographically sustainable when farmed, fish farms themselves remain controversial due to the disproportionately large amount of wild fish caught to supply them.

Have your say on the fish being served in your local restaurants over at: www.fish2fork.com. Together we can make a difference when eating out by choosing to dine on sustainably sourced fish.

Also, for those readers based in the UK, be sure to catch The End of the Line online if you haven’t already.