All Fish Are Noble

All Fish Are Noble

If we look at the diversity of fish species, Portugal is indeed a rich country. However, with the increases in purchasing power, incoming tourism, and the consequent boom in the restaurant business, there has been a huge pressure on the supposedly noble fish species, the sustainability of which is, in some cases, at risk. Unfortunately, most consumers believe that, regarding wild fish, anything other than seabass, gilt-head bream, red bream, wreckfish, seabream, bluefin tuna, octopus, monkfish and the like, is not good enough. If we fail to act at both educating consumers and, especially, raising awareness amongst food opinion leaders, we will be steadily heading down a path of rampant destruction of fish stocks.

The project All Fish Are Noble aims to create amongst the public, namely, youngsters, cooking school students and the chef community, a habit of consuming fish varieties with a safer stock situation, which, although often dismissed as less noble, bear great culinary potential.

Project activities include:

•  Creation of a micro website, within Público journal website, which aggregates the journalistic contents of the project.
• Publication of news about the state of stocks of different fish species and reports with multimedia support about fishing community’s gastronomic traditions with species less used by most consumers as well as dissemination of the nutritional values of different species, highlighting those that have better stocks and, with the help of renowned chefs, the dissemination of recipes using the so-called less noble species.
• Creation and publication of a podcast on this topic.
• Organization of a conference on the theme of fisheries and fish communities.