Read: Irish Examiner | Future-proofing our fish supply: ‘Whatever the small boats bring us, we take’
Despite living on an island, surrounded by the sea, we have a complicated relationship with fish. After struggling through the rigid Catholic fish-on-a-Friday ethos – no matter how old that fillet was – and coming to the realisation that fish can be fresh, delicious and nutritious and that we should eat more of it, we’re now encountering questions of sustainability: where has the fish come from and how it has been fished?
Last month, three civil society organisations – Marine Conservation Society, Seas At Risk and Oceana – launched a campaign to end bottom trawling in Marine Protected Areas across the EU. A fishing practice that has been widely condemned, bottom trawling involves dragging weighted nets along the ocean floor to scoop up large numbers of edible fish while also killing other marine life, destroying underwater habitats and decimating fish stocks. It’s not a pretty picture. This is large scale fishing and the campaign identifies the fact that bottom trawling “negatively impacts both the sustainability of fish populations and the fishing industry itself, especially small-scale and low-impact fishers that account for 80% of the active European fleet and 50% of jobs in the sector.”
Since opening Goldie, her seafood restaurant in Cork City, chef-owner Aishling Moore has operated by buying from small day boats, primarily from East Cork’s Ballycotton, and developing the menu from that day’s catch. It may be sustainable, in terms of the fish being caught and landed locally, but it’s also a difficult way to run a business. When the seas are calm, Moore gets fish just hours after it has been landed but there are other times when it’s just not possible to get volume or variety. “The weather affects our business so much,“ she says. “Some days I can only get hake or pollock. We are dramatically affected by the weather.”
It’s not something that customers notice when they look at the carefully curated menu in Goldie. Whether it’s the langoustine potato crisps (flavoured using shells – “we have 100% zero waste on langoustines”), taking fish trimmings and turning them into Japanese-style karaage fish nuggets, salting fish for brandade or curing it for fish pastrami, Moore operates a gill-to-fin style of cookery which makes the most of precious resources, no matter what the sea is doing.
Working on changing consumer mindset is something that Moore has been conscious of since she opened the restaurant in late 2019. “It’s challenging but rewarding. We have had to bring everyone else on the journey with us, including customers. The real challenge is to offer as much variety as possible, within limitations. At Christmas, when the weather was bad, we had fishcakes on the menu as a main, along with Ballycotton shrimp and Roaring Water Bay mussels. We used salted fish from the larder to get another dish in there. We try to do things that aren’t typical.” Using a whole catch approach – “whatever the small boats bring us, we take” the menu proudly states – enables Moore to think fish-first, the dishes coming from what has been landed, not from a pre-set list.
For her, sustainable “means will [that fish] be here again next year and in the years following? We’ve gotten to a stage when we know that’s not possible any more due to the demand for certain species in Ireland and across the world. We chefs – and consumers – put pressure on the supply chain and everyone writing a menu is trying to be sure what they’re offering is what customers want.” To get around this, Moore wants to encourage people to “eat a variety of species, not just one. If you see an unfamiliar fish on a menu, try it!”
She’s also a fan of regenerative aquaculture, defining it in her recently released book Whole Catch (Blasta Books) as “the rehabilitation and conservation of the ocean through farming. Seaweeds and shellfish like oysters and mussels are grown as viable food sources that require very little resources compared to agriculture.” Regenerative ocean farming makes a lot of sense for an island nation: we’re in an ideal position to focus on this practice that can benefit the ocean while also producing nutritious, delicious and environmentally sustainable food. It’s something that Moore would like to draw more attention to. Last August, as part of the Cork on a Fork festival, she cooked a feast of locally landed mussels, oysters, crabs, periwinkles and lobster to highlight the important role that shellfish has in improving water quality along our coastline, filtering seawater, sequestering nitrogen and carbon and increasing biodiversity.
“I would love to be more reliant on shellfish,” Moore says, “but building that into the concept will take some time for us.” Meanwhile, with Goldie dishes like oysters served with granita or baked into sausage rolls, mussels on creamed watercress and clams cooked with miso and lime kosho (a citrus-salt-chilli Japanese condiment), she’s encouraging people down that road, one new taste at a time.
If we want to eat seafood sustainably – and have it there for generations to come – we need to do it thoughtfully. As consumers, there are positive changes that we can make: buying locally so that we can ask about sourcing, eating a variety of seafood, making the absolute most of every bit of the fish that we buy, incorporating shellfish into our diets and, if we’re in a restaurant, choosing that unknown fish from the menu. You just might discover a new, sustainable favourite.
Whole Catch by Aishling Moore (Blasta Books, €15) is out now.
