With Gordon Ramsay confronting heavily armed Costa Rican gangsters/shark finners as a possible high point, Britain’s Channel 4 has enlisted a long line of the nation’s – and Europe’s – most famous celebrity chefs in a campaign to include sustainably fished fish only on menus.
With television presenter/food writer Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall – who is already running a “Hugh’s Fish Fight” campaign – at the hub with three shows of his own, the series between 11-17 January also features, besides Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal.
“We’re fighting against greed and overindulgence,” Ramsay told the Daily Mail. “Chefs are part of the problem. We’re responsible for making people want certain fish”.
“The situation is getting worse,” remarked Oliver, naming salmon, cod and tuna as three species exploited to the brink of extinction by the EU’s hugely wasteful Common Fisheries Policy.
Consequently, Oliver focuses on “all these other fish that end up getting thrown back into the sea” in his program, preparing dishes of less popular, but more sustainable, species like pouting, coley and dab.
Ramsay, when discussing who to make what in the series, made clear that he was not one to diddle with pouting, coley and dab: “Forget it – I’m doing sharks, mate.”
So, Channel 4 sent him to Costa Rica to investigate the illegal shark-finning trade, according to this angry chef “a multibillion-dollar industry, completely unregulated”.
“These gangs operate from places that are like forts, with barbed-wire perimeters and gun towers” Ramsay told the Daily Mail.
“At one, I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me.”
Escaping that situation, Ramsey ran into several other confrontations with shark-finners, and was eventually advised by Costa Rican police to leave the country, for his and his team’s own safety.
For internet users with a British IP address, the programs can be viewed on the “Channel 4 on Demand” site.