reLAKSation 447
Charles Clover, author of ‘The End of the Line’ (the book and movie concerned with safeguarding the seas) is highly critical of the aquaculture industry. He argues that it takes five pounds of fish, such as the Peruvian anchoveta and the blue whiting, to grow just one pound of salmon. He says that we should be eating these fish rather than grinding them up to make food for salmon.
Whilst Mr Clover is extremely vocal about feeding fish to fish, he remains strangely quiet about using wild caught fish to feed other animals. Mars Petcare, manufacturers of Whiskas and Sheba, has announced that they intend to offer MSC certified sustainable fish in their branded cat food sold in Europe by Christmas this year. They have also pledged to source all of their fish globally from sustainable fisheries by 2020. In the UK, pets eat about 1.5 million tonnes of specially prepared food every year. It is not clear what proportion of fish is used in this figure.
However, what is clear is that unlike salmon farming, cats are not fed on the fish that humans are not so keen to eat. The Whiskas range includes: tuna, prawn, salmon, cod, sardine, herring, whitebait and white fish. The Sheba range includes additionally, trout, swordfish, and plaice. However, this fishy offering does not stop there. Other fish species used to make cat food found in UK supermarkets included pilchards, haddock, hake, shrimp and smoked salmon. Surprisingly, much of the fish used is not the trimmings but rather prime fillet. Mars Petcare has said that they intend to phase out the use of prime fillet as part of this initiative, but does this go far enough?
Those who are concerned about there not being enough fish in the sea, like Mr Clover, should be looking hard at the use of any fish in pet food, let alone that which is sustainably certified and which should be reserved for human consumption. Cats already benefit from a varied diet due to the wide range of terrestrially sourced ingredients so there shouldn’t be any need to include fish in any of the recipes. Whiskas includes: beef, lamb, chicken, rabbit, turkey, duck and pork. Sheba also offers, ham, game and goose.
If fish are to be included in cat food, then surely the trimming waste from processing is good enough for inclusion in the various recipes. What makes the use of this valuable resource in cat food more difficult to accept is that fish is not really the natural food of cats in the wild? Fish is included for the benefit of the owners who want to give their pets the best. Despite advertising to suggest otherwise, cats don’t express an opinion about the food they eat. The products are designed to be attractive to cat owners.
By comparison, the small fish are the natural prey of salmon. Farmers are simply replicating their diet using the same wild caught fish. Critics of the salmon farming industry find this objectionable and recommend that consumers eat wild salmon instead, even though they consume the same small fish. What the critics fail to understand is that the more farmed fish that are eaten, the less fish that need to be caught from the sea. This is a much better route to sustainability than feeding certified fish stocks to pet cats.
Mars Petcare say that it can cost fisheries £100,000 to become certified by the Marine Stewardship Council but that they will absorb the cost of buying the more expensive fish. It is a commonly held belief that sustainably certified fish will cost more to buy because of the cost of certification. However, it has been difficult to confirm whether this is the case or not since retailers rarely offer standard and certified products together.
There is one example in the UK where comparison is possible. MSC certified cod loin is sold alongside own label cod loin in one supermarket chain. When the MSC cod loin was launched it was priced at £14.38/kg, the same as the supermarket’s own label product. After a few months, the price of the supermarket’s own label was increased by 20p/kg to £14.58/kg which is what it is today. By comparison, the MSC cod loin is now priced at just £12.00/kg!! The disparity between the two products is probably not based just on the issue of sustainability but it does seem that consumers are unwilling to pay more for a sustainable product.
The unanswered question is whether farming companies will be prepared to invest in sustainable credentials, such as those to be offered by the ASC, if consumers are unwilling to pay the premium needed to cover the cost of certification. After all, aquaculture producers have much less to prove about sustainability than those who catch wild fish. Consumers seem happy to buy salmon now in huge volumes and so far not one fish has yet been sustainably certified.
