A tin of tuna, a store cupboard staple with a long shelf life, but you may ponder if pods of dolphins have perished in purse seine nets used to catch the ptuna (PGW reference) and you may wonder what sort of tuna it is and from whence it came. Don’t say the sea!
It is remarkable that, at least in Europe, the main purveyors of tinned fish have become virtually 100% sustainable. They became expert at track and trace long before we bungled it here in the pandemic. It is strange that fish swimming around all over the place can be deemed “certified sustainable seafood” while even MP Evans’ palm oil is not yet 100% sustainable. It will be in a couple of years. Strange because once palm oil is planted it doesn’t go anywhere for about twenty years. MPE decided not to reinvent the wheel and brought onboard an expert: Darian McBain.
She guided the Thai Union Group in its transition to sustainability. TUG is the owner of John West. If you have a tin of John West fish that isn’t as old as the hills (in which case chuck) go to the JW website and put in the barcode to Trace Your Plate. If you have a tin of Princes Tuna Steak, simply turn it over.
Skipjack tuna from the Indian Ocean landed on Mauritius, good until 2025. While Darian McBain made a significant contribution to improving the image of the John West brand I am not so naive as to believe the industry is perfect; to put it mildly, as Nick Robinson is so fond of saying on the Today programme. Depletion of stocks and cowboy operators are among unsolved problems. Easy to criticise people in far away places but wild Atlantic salmon running up rivers in the British Isles are under threat too. Disease spread by fish farms, netting in estuaries and pollution are only a few of the challenges faced by the Atlantic Salmon Trust.
If I may digress, many years ago I caught a salmon on a “catch and release” river. I dispatched it with my priest as the ghillie concurred it was too badly hooked to release. A friend remarked: “so interesting to see the technicality of catch and release”.
This will strike a chord if you live in the wet UK.
The talk of tinned fish reminds me of the sign on an Alaskan tinning plant “If we can we eat it; if we can’t we can it”