When it comes to food waste in the seafood industry, the key buzzword is bycatch. That term represents the creatures caught as a byproduct when fishing for another type of seafood.
And the numbers are shocking–as much as half of fish caught in the Europe are being thrown back into the ocean, dead. This bycatch occurs with a variety of methods, but fishing with large nets is the main culprit.
I’m at the Cooking For Solutions institute this week, and bycatch has come up quite a bit, most notably, in Callum Roberts talk. If it’s anything like his talk, Callum’s book, The Ocean of Life, will be a fascinating discussion of how we’ve degraded our oceans and what we can do better.
British chef/activist Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is also helping spread the word against fish waste. His Hugh’s Fish Fight campaign provides an avenue to take action against bycatch. Important stuff.
Given its significance, it’s a topic I wish I’d dealt with more in my book. But it is one that I’ll be paying closer attention to in the coming months.