There always has to be a disaster about to fall on us. And not completely without foundation. By chance, a few scary news and comment items about the decline of fish in the seas - and not just around our coasts - have come up recently. For example, Luc Hoffman, President for France of the WWF, World
Wildlife Foundation, writes of the awful over-fishing, as he sees it, in our oceans. There are many fish species whose stocks have fallen by more than 70 per cent, he says. And heavy trawlers destroy the floor of the seas, where the young should be born, and big factory ships suck up everything, with 30 per cent of the fish dead in the process; and a lot of what is kept is used to make meal for fodder for domestic animals.
Action must be taken, he says, and quickly. Subventions for training fishermen for other careers. This from a sort of symposium in a recent Figaro magazine: "Let's halt the massacre." Apart from these practices, it is said, pollution by oil spills and nuclear dumping is turning the seas into the world's rubbish bin. One part of the text tells us that the Baltic Sea is dying from pollution. That has been said before. But salmon still seem to go up the
Vistula. And, having scared us, Figaro tells us that it would not require so much effort to turn things around. There is hope. As to the fate of small fish caught in the nets, there is an interesting article in the Spectator by Digby
Anderson on the food page. He tells us that Spanish fish markets on the south-
west coast, i.e. the Atlantic, sell some 50 varieties of fish, and that you can more or less go through them all in two weeks if you eat two courses each for lunch and dinner.
He worked through the many varieties including what he calls the "steak"
fishes; tuna, swordfish, shark and corvina (What's that?). Then he comes down to the small fish. "Strangers to Spain will not believe just how small some of these are when sold. With the last three" [he had mentioned baby whiting, baby soles and red mullet] there might be, say, eight to the pound or more - an environmentalist's nightmare, a gastronome's dream."