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French restaurants may lead the way in serving some of the finest dishes, but its chefs and owners are often unaware of the importance of serving sustainable seafood, says a new survey.
This is the conclusion of the first ranking of French restaurants judged on the sustainability of what they serve, carried out by the international website Fish2fork. The website was conceived by the makers of the celebrated feature-length documentary on over-fishing, The End of the Line, in response to official UN figures which show that 85 per cent of the world’s wild fish stocks are either fully or over-exploited.
Fish2fork asked 76 leading fish restaurants to identify which species of seafood they served, where it came from and how it was caught. The restaurants were ranked according to their success in sourcing seafood from well-managed stocks.
After examining the menus and asking follow-up questions researchers concluded that 23 (30 per cent) deserved a rating of up to four “blue fish” for their sourcing practices.
The highest rating that can be achieved is five blue fish. However, some 53 restaurants (70 per cent) justified a rating of up to five “red fish skeletons” – the lowest possible score.
Reasons for giving low rankings included giving their customers poor information about the species of fish they served or actively serving what conservationists consider “fish to avoid”.
Fish2fork’s sustainability champion, with four blue fish, is Francois Pasteau, chef and proprietor of the modern bistro restaurant Epi Dupin in Paris’s 6th arrondissement. He developed an interest in flavours that worked with one another and in using unusual or forgotten species of fish, to explore different tastes. On the way he found out about the global crisis of overfishing. He now includes sustainability among his top criteria for sourcing fish, along with seasonality, quality and freshness.
By contrast with the top “blue” restaurants, there were many restaurants for whom sustainability might as well have been a foreign language, with five serving the critically endangered European eel and three serving wild caviar from Caspian species of sturgeon, most of which are listed as endangered.
Researchers noticed a remarkable disparity between the amount of information restaurants considered important to provide their customers about food sourced on land and food sourced from the sea. They found that five of the restaurants surveyed were still serving bluefin tuna but 26 per cent had stopped serving it because they were aware stocks were in trouble.
The award of a Michelin star was no guide to the sustainability of the fish that was served – there are Michelin-starred restaurants with “blue fish” and “red fish skeletons” in the survey.
Charles Clover, editor of Fish2fork, said: “What future are we creating for the next generations of French chef if many species of wild fish become a thing of the past and come off the menu because we have let them go practically extinct in the wild?
“There are many initiatives this year designed to renew the great days of French gastronomy. I find it surprising that none of these seem to be about sustainability, as you will only have the greatest cuisine if there remains a full variety of fish to cook.”
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