Angela Hartnett argued for a change in attitudes to British seafood, while Alan Dein paid tribute to the microphone for the BBC’s centenary
Already a familiar face from television, chef Angela Hartnett is even more impressive on radio. Her clear, assured, instantly recognisable voice is made for the medium. In A Fishy Phobia (Radio 4, Tuesday) she argued passionately for a change in British attitudes to seafood, a national food resource in which we are unbelievably rich. Yet what do we do with it? Send most of it abroad.
It’s a situation made even more baffling by our seeming love of eating fish while on holiday yet abandonment of it once we get back. Hartnett began in a pre-dawn Brixham, Devon, home to Britain’s largest fish market, listing the amazing variety on offer: “lemon and dover sole, squid, monkfish, turbot, scallops, hake, bass, pollack, red mullet, whiting and herring, to say nothing of the lobster and crab.” Almost all of which was destined for export to Europe.
Hartnett’s most damning statistic related to the rigidity of British tastes and the so-called “famous five” – cod, salmon, haddock, prawns and tuna – that are about the only seafood available in supermarkets anymore. As a result, while 80 per cent of what’s caught by our fishermen is exported, 80 per cent of the fish we do eat comes from abroad. Unbelievably, we import 23,000 tonnes of cod from China every year. China. Which is, in just about every respect – politically, economically and environmentally – a head-hanging national shame.
Underpinning all this was a filleted social history of fish-eating in Britain (was it the associations with Catholicism, or class attitudes to herring – once a staple for the poor – and fish’n’chips that made us turn up our noses?) and the acute observation that, nowadays, we seem happiest eating fish when it comes from another culture, even if it’s raw.