Do you favor local and seasonal fruits and vegetables? Do the same with the fish.
A slice of smoked salmon, a dozen oysters, a few scallops… Many Belgians invite fish and shellfish to their holiday table. This is therefore the moment that Hugo Clément chose to dedicate an issue of “Sur le front” to sustainable fishing. What fish to buy so as not to empty the oceans? This is the question he will answer on Monday at 9:05 p.m. on France 5.
Eat what is caught
There are two ways to create a menu. The most logical thing would be to go to the merchant, see what they offer and establish your menu accordingly. But most often we act the opposite way: we decide on the menu, then we draw up our shopping list. If Belgians decide to eat salmon at Christmas, from the fisherman to the fishmonger, the entire industry must mobilize to put salmon on the shelves… What if we changed our point of view? “Let’s stop catching what we want to eat, let’s eat what we catch instead!” This is the philosophy of NorthSeaChefs, a Belgian collective founded by Filip Claeys, two-star chef at De Jonkman in Bruges.
D’Adinkerke au Japon
About fifteen years ago, during a trip to Japan, Filip Claeys ate tuna. Wow! What flavor, what finesse! This tuna has absolutely nothing to do with the one we find here. And for good reason: in Japan, tuna is a local product. For Filip, grandson of a fisherman from Adinkerke, this tasting had the effect of an electric shock. Back in Belgium, he brought together a few chefs to think about the fish they offer on the menu. From Lionel Rigolet to Sang Hoon Degeimbre, the greatest are joining the movement. “Why eat tuna or salmon when the North Sea offers a great diversity of fish?” asks Christophe Pauly, starred chef at Coq aux Champs. “More and more of us want to eat local, sustainable and seasonal, but we often ignore that this also concerns fish.”
A huge waste
Local has become obvious to many: it is better to have food that does not travel across the planet before arriving on our plate. We think about the season for fruits and vegetables, but less so for seafood. However, each fish has its season, linked to its reproductive cycle. “It’s nonsense to eat sole in summer,” explains chef Pauly. “It is full of milt, very soft and not very pleasant. Furthermore, do you know that to obtain 100 kilos of sole, you have to catch a ton of fish? The waste is immense because the consumer wants his sole and not the other species brought up with it in the net. So, what do we do with it?
No longer throwing it back into the sea
In the past, fishermen threw unwanted fish back into the sea, where they were condemned to almost certain death after spending several (tens) minutes on deck. Since 2019, this practice has been prohibited. Everything that is fished must normally be brought back to port, even if it means being transformed into animal meal. NorthSeaChefs campaigns so that all fishing can be promoted in cooking. In Bruges, chef Claeys offers pout. In Tinlot, Christophe Pauly cooks dogfish.
Can we change mentalities? They are convinced of it. A few decades ago, fishermen systematically rejected monkfish because they found them awful… Today we know that monkfish cheeks, liver and tail are a delicacy!
This article appeared in Le Télépro on 12/12/2024
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