MSC promotes sustainable seafood for pub menus

The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has today (5 May) launched its most comprehensive advice yet to help pub chefs source sustainable seafood.

The MCS pocket Good Fish Guide has also been updated and now includes a credit card-sized guide to buying fish with tips and questions to ask the supplier.

It has also launched an online consumer guide to sustainable seafood — the Good Fish Guide (www.goodfishguide.org.uk​) — that gives advice and recipe ideas to help simplify and vary buying choices. The site links with www.fishonline.org​, which is already well-used by the public and industry to source sustainable fish.

Fishonline was used by celebrity chefs during Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Channel 4 Fish Fight earlier this year.

MCS aquaculture and fisheries programme manager, Dr Peter Duncan, says these sources of information are vital to saving fish stocks. In the UK 90% of fish sales are from just five species — tuna, cod, salmon, prawns and haddock.

The MCS wants to see lesser used but tasty fish such as pollack, gurnard, coley, dab and sprats back on pub and restaurant menus.

The updated guides provide options and ideas for new species as well as the best choices for traditional choices.

However, Duncan raised concerns about the poor labelling of fish in supermarkets and fishmongers.

"The use of a traffic light system to indicate the nutritional value of supermarket produce is now well established but the labelling of fish and fish products sold in supermarkets has not kept up," he said.

"It is still virtually impossible to tell precisely where most fish and fish products have been caught."