How much do we know about the seafood we eat?
'Gourmet Farmer' Matthew Evans looks at the problems with the seafood Australians consume
Eco warrior: Matthew Evans wants to see labelling that reflects where seafood comes from and how it was produced, so the public can make decisions about sustainability and choose not to export destruction.
There's no denying the profound effect that MasterChef and the unstoppable Jamie Oliver have had on the way we think about our daily food and where it comes from.
Chef-turned-farmer-turned-TV presenter Matthew Evans is hoping that his three-part documentary What's The Catch? will have a similar effect upon our consumption of seafood.
It's estimated that more than 70 per cent of the seafood consumed in Australia is imported from countries where intensive farming is destroying marine ecosystems. And despite what is regarded as some of the world's best practices, Australian fisheries are putting entire species of shark and blue fin tuna at risk.
Equally troubling is the anomaly in labelling regulations.
Whereas fresh, uncooked seafood must state the species and its country of origin, ready-to-eat seafood sold in fish-and-chip shops and restaurants is exempt.
That means the "flake" you eat in your Friday night takeaway could in fact be any of 400 species of shark, including the vulnerable school shark.
It's estimated 50 per cent of seafood consumed in Australia is sold "ready to eat".
Evans hopes that What's The Catch? will not only raise public awareness of exactly what we are consuming and how it was caught, but prompt regulators to stamp out a deceptive practice.
"I want to see labelling that reflects where it came from and how it was produced, (so the public can) make decisions about sustainability and not export destruction. The Seafood Importers Association is dead against things like country of origin labelling. They say they can trace every prawn back to a farm in Thailand and I can tell you that is not the case.
"I think if you can obscure the origin of your seafood people in Australia will generally assume it came from somewhere close, from a local fisher and if told otherwise they will presume they will pay a different price. Obscuring the origin is in the interests of the importers."
Evans says he was galvanised to embark on the show, which is one-part investigative documentary, one-part grass-roots activism, by the arrival of the super trawler Margiris in 2012.
That coincided with what Evans says was "the catastrophic fisheries collapse around Africa, in Europe and parts of north America".
"There was a perception ... that this boat arriving on our shores represented the collapse of fisheries in Australia. That triggered within me and the production company the question of what's happening with our seafood".
Having made several seasons of the "soft, lifestyle-y" Gourmet Farmer, which documented Evans' tree-change odyssey from Sydney food critic to self-sufficient farmer in Tasmania, he was keen to tackle a more hard-hitting topic.
A topic that, coincidentally, British presenter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame has also covered in two series of Hugh's Fish Fight. "We're from the same philosophical background, we want to know where food comes from", says Evans, noting that "twice now I've followed in the footsteps of Hugh without realising".Evans believes that there are cultural and practical reasons that the quest for what we might call ethical seafood consumption has been slower to evolve than has been the case of other livestock.
"The ocean looks the same if there's fish or no fish in it. What's happened is hard to see because fishing boats go out, if they decide to throw back fish or to 'live fin' sharks it's hard to document that compared to what's done to land-based animals.
"But I think it's also a cultural thing, that we see the ocean as almost never-ending, there were fish there yesterday there'll be fish there tomorrow. We haven't had the experience of America and northern Europe where they stopped catching fish, where certain species became, not extinct, but commercially extinct so it becomes increasingly risky to catch some species. But as we see in the show, 72% of Australia's seafood isn't Australian and so whatever we eat impacts on the origin of that seafood".
Prawn fishing is a $3 billion industry in Thailand, which is where much of Australia's most iconic seafood is sourced.
But the practices that have developed around prawn farming in Thailand and other places have made it unsustainable, says Evans.
In effect, Australia is exporting an environmental problem, he says.
But, he argues, it's not beyond the scope of people here to make changes.
"I spoke to the CEO of Pizza Hut in Australia and he said to me, very simply, our pizzas are too highly engineered to just have any prawn on them.
"They have the buying power to insist that prawns come from a farm that has sustainable practices, whether that's to do with not using 'trash fish' (a feed that is made from debris on the ocean floor) or waste water management. These companies are big enough to do it".
As we see in the show, such as when a Sydney pizza chain adds a sustainable, better-tasting and only slightly more expensive prawn to its menu, change is possible.
The federal senate has begun a series of hearings that Evans believes will lead to better labelling, though is unlikely to go as far as the European Union, where labels state how the fish was caught and if it is farmed.
He also wants food magazines, restaurateurs, cooking shows and retailers to start promoting the benefits of under-utilised, plentiful, inexpensive but little-known species of fish in place of the old favourites, salmon, blue eye, etc.
"We're trying to galvanise the public to ask questions about where their seafood comes from and I think it's through things like this you can have an impact.
"Ours is a very non-sexy topic, the labelling of fish, but the reality in Australia is that we don't have fishery collapse like they do in the United Kingdom. But we have a fundamental flaw in the legislation surrounding the labelling of seafood".
Source : The Age October 16th, 2016 Paul Kalina
