by Alec Muffett
No joke.
Nine months ago, most major supermarkets were selling dill, mustard and other flavours of pickled herring. From Waitrose to Lidl via all the rest, you could get anything as far as pickled fish went – notably the Spinnaker brand from Finland.
Now? You’re lucky to get rollmops, and that’s all.
What gives? Is this a seasonal thing, or has there been some shift of availability or stocks?
Now you’ve got me curious. The next time I stop by the local grocer’s, I’m going to check their stock. (U.S.) My parents love herring. Sheesh, you can even buy it (pickled herring) through Amazon (offerings from Pacific Northwest) although shipping is to continental U.S.
Shouldn’t it be, “Where have all the herring gone?” Long time passing.
😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Have_All_the_Flowers_Gone%3F
I’ve located some online, from Orkney, and it’s delicious (found a pot of the same stuff in a very upscale grocer today) – so that will suffice for the moment to satisfy cravings.
But I still wonder what’s up…
Not very up to date, but noteworthy here is that Atlantic herring spawn from late August through October, according to this:
http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/sos/spsyn/pp/herring/
It reminds me of the grunion coming in to spawn in California, a well celebrated event, but you don’t want to hunt the lead grunion, or none the the rest of the grunion come to shore to spawn. Feasible?
According to my other half (a BBC food journalist FWIW :-p ) the problem could be two fold.
– Firstly herring stocks seem to be very very low this year. No one really knows why as they haven’t been over fished but for some reason they just didn’t breed as much this year.
– The good old “credit crunch”!! It seems that while shops are still very much trying to give as much choice to the consumer as ever they have started to offer more of the simpler things and less of the speciality foods as (they think) people seem to be more interested in the pennies at the moment.
No idea if any of this is right, just her ideas.
My guess is that this is related to overfishing, I couldn’t find any recent stats but this is from 2005:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=367&Pos=3&ColRank=2&Rank=448
The North Sea herring population was seriously affected by over-fishing in the 1970s. The closure of the North Sea fishery between 1978 and 1982 allowed stocks to recover. From the late 1980s there was another decline in stocks of North Sea herring. This recovered again from the mid-1990s and in 2004 the stock was at the highest level recorded for 40 years, but declined slightly in 2005.
Aha – this is more up to date..
http://www.cefas.co.uk/media/31684/herringnorthsea.pdf
ICES recommends that in order to bring the stock above Bpa = 1.3 million tonnes by 2009, there should be no ?shing in 2008.
That’d do it..
Bah – that really did say fishing when I pasted it in!
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