River cobblers

The label illustrated was lurking in the kitchen this morning and caught my eye. What a load of old cobblers I thought. The clowns of food packaging - the people who bring us that ever so healthy olive spread (aka margarine) which is actually made mainly of a mixture of rape seed oil and palm oil - are at it again. But why on earth are they banging on about rivers when the white fish that we eat all comes from the sea?

Closer inspection revealed, that having more or less done in the once plentiful stocks of white fish in and around our own islands, we are reduced to importing farmed white fish from Vietnam, from approximately the other side of the globe, presumably from somewhere in the Mekong river basin. It does claim to have been responsibly farmed, so hopefully not doing any more damage to Vietnam than the release of all kinds of interesting waste products from fish farming into their waters - my being reminded of some eco-rant about how fish farming in warm climates can have interesting side effects.

And the Vietnamese get rich, or at least less poor, on the back of our inability to look after our own. One more dent in our presently dreadful balance of payments - and with the possible result that some Vietnamese tycoon will one day wind up owning both the Parthenon and Windsor Castle.

The fish in question is now part of the kedgeree destined for our lunch. Not much like the sub-continental original which seems to have been pulse & rice rather than fish & rice.