caroline bennett

What do you do as the owner of a sushi bar when you realise that worldwide fish stocks are in crisis? I was presented with this problem when one day in 1998 I walked into my restaurant, Moshi Moshi to find that there was no bluefin tuna on the belt because it had become so scarce it was on the road to extinction.

After much soul searching, and many discussions with Greenpeace and WWF, I embarked on a strategy that would make Moshi Moshi's fish procurement as sustainable as possible. The first thing I did was to take blue fin tuna off the menu. The second thing I did was to go down to Cornwall to speak to the local fishermen.

What I came away with was a deal: Moshi Moshi would buy the fish directly from the boats, offering a higher price than the middlemen, if the fishermen guaranteed to use the most sustainable fishing practices.

Fish is a legitimate part of our diet – indeed, many argue that it was the nutritional value of fish that kick-started the evolution of human intelligence. Now we have to apply that intelligence to managing our fish stocks for future generations. A fish shopper who cares about that will go out of their way to find fish from a sustainable source. That generally means knowing where it comes from, and how it was caught.