Still not able to blog much - computer problems and aches in my right arm are not encouraging me to do much. Its very frustrating.
But, as someone who tries to eat ethically, I just wanted to write about a dilemma I experienced. Last week, I went to Cardiff for a seminar of journalists in education, because I've got a part time job teaching news reporting at Goldsmiths starting in September, which is very exciting.
The night before the meeting, most of the journalists went for a meal at a Portugese restuarant in Cardiff. Now, I like Portugese food and this seemed a nice place, genuine, bustling, lots of happy groups of people, and interesting things on the menu.
I didnt want meat - it was a warm night, suggesting something lighter and I'd eaten a lot of meat earlier in the week - although there were great looking kebab type things, with hunks of chicken and lamb on a skewer suspended above the table. But all the main course fish on the menu was potentially problematic and the waiters didnt seem the types to know, for instance, whether the salmon was farmed, or the halibut from sustainable sources. I know this is difficult when eating out, rather , than buying from a shop, but if you are going to try and eat ethically, then you have to do your best and encourage restuarants of all kinds to name their sources, so to speak. I would not have had the chicken on the Cardiff menu, for instance, simply because I knew it was almost certainly not free range and I have and absolute ban on eating chicken that I can't be reasonably certain about. This can cause problems: I once created a bit of a scene in the restaurant at the Globe Theatre (and quite a smart one) because they could not tell me the source of the chicken on their post-show menu. My point is that restuarants like that at the Globe theatre, which operate to a certain standard and charge appropriately ought to be able to tell the customer where the chicken (or fish) is from, so that we can make informed choices. And anyway, I would expect a place like that to have free range chicken and it shocked me when the waiter eventually said he believed it wasnt free range. I ended up with a rather dull pasta dish.
So, back to Cardiff and a restuarant, despite an interesting menu, is not the kind of more upmarket place where they are going to know and cite the source of everything they sell. And their special fish of the night was hake. Now, in common with most of the Iberian peninsular, I love hake, but I also know that its one of the most endangered white fish because of over fishing and that the Spaniards particularly, have been guilty of plundering stocks without thought for the future. But I also know that they would cook and serve the hake with love and care at this place and that the greater crime was to have caught and bought it in the first place, rather than consume it once the deed has been done. That creates another ethical dilemma - the wasting of food. So, I ordered the hake. I consoled myself with the thought that, when the dish arrived - the fish steaks pan fried, with a garlicky sauce - at least it was from a large, adult fish, which would have had a decent life and spawned some offspring. Eating younger, smaller fish from endangered stocks, which is increasingly happening, is entirely wrong. But all was not well - this not being London, they served two huge steaks of hake and I could only manage one. The second would almost certainly have gone straight to the kitchen scraps bin. I couldnt really ask for a doggy bag to take back to my hotel. In London, I would have turned it into fishcakes the next day. So, it seems that whatever you try to do to eat ethically and with environmental awareness, there is some new dilemma around every corner. And the hake? It was delicious, of course. But I'm still worrying about that wasted steak.