For the love of cod

8 January 2011

Can our celebrity chefs save the British fishing industry?

Years — actually decades — ago, a gentleman from the British civil service, interviewing me as a potential candidate for a job in the European Commission, explained that ‘all the important decisions in Brussels are prepared by the chefs’. As he spoke, I had a vision of men in tall white hats stirring dishes on a large stove in the middle of the Berlaymont.

‘Chefs?’ I queried.

The man quickly explained that he meant the ‘chefs de cabinet’, the Commissioners’ aides, who basically ran the show while the great men had long lunches at expensive Brussels restaurants. Still, this vision of the all-powerful chef was a vivid one and it came back to me when I read of the preparations being made for next week’s Channel Four ‘television chef’ spectacular. Forget about poets being the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Today it is the chefs who are coming out of the kitchen into the heat of political controversy.

Not any old chefs, mind you. I barely know one end of an egg from another, but I am quite aware that these are the big boys. For most of next week, Channel Four is running programmes featuring some of the great ‘celebrity chefs’ of our time: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal. And they are coming together for a nakedly political objective.

Let me go back for a moment to Brussels, when I first arrived there in the early seventies. The United Kingdom, on entering the then EEC, had just given up its right to control its own living marine resources. Official documents subsequently released make it clear just how cynical the trade-off between UK fish and UK entry was. Since then, as far as the management of our fish stocks is concerned, it has been downhill all the way. The first of the television programmes Channel Four is screening next week will be presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. According to the blurb, HFW is determined to raise awareness of diminishing fish stocks. ‘Focusing on the three species most widely consumed in the UK — cod, salmon and tuna — Hugh leaves no stone unturned in his mission to understand what is happening to the British fishing industry. In the process he is horrified to learn that up to half of all fish caught in the North Sea are thrown back dead.’

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Stanley Johnson | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

J. Leyden

January 15th, 2011 3:48am Report this comment

The "honourable and well-intentioned men" seemed to have had an aversion to admitting they were disastrously wrong. As for their successors, they seem hell-bent on making things worse.
When I saw the trailers for these programmes, I thought it highly unlikely that the activist telly 'chefs' would do anything to harm politicians. They were much more likely to blame the people who pay the politicians' wages, and so it has proved.
You mention the manufactured story of Ramsay allegedly being attacked. Do you seriously think that a hot property like him would be exposed, or expose himself to danger? You are credulous, as bureaucrats (past and present) must be.

Post comment