Two Second Memory

It’s about 13 years ago that I gave up eating commercially caught fish as a personal protest against the practice. I would eat fish caught locally (in fact the last fish I ate was a trout barbecued in butter and garlic caught by a friend’s neighbour) but this only lasted a year or so and I stopped shortly afterwards

After reading this article in the Guardian I see that nothing has changed. In fact it’s got worse.

A couple of facts from the article:

• There is 32 million tonnes of bycatch a year, i.e. about one third of all fish caught are thrown away
• For every prawn you eat fish weighting 10—20 times the weight are thrown away. Yes that’s right for every 1Kg of prawns you eat 10 to 20 Kgs of all kinds of fish are caught, often left to die on the deck while the prawns are being pulled out, and then thrown back overboard.

There are many, many other horrifying points raised in the article and I implore you to read it.

Finally: ” … that by 2050 we will only be able to meet the fish protein needs of half the world population: all that will be left for the unlucky half may be, as he puts it, ‘jellyfish and slime’.”. And the really sad thing about this whole affair is that the half won’t be the fat and over fed west.

Filed by rgh at 16:19 under General