If we fret about baby octopi, then how we feel about whitebait? You’d think it must be really bad and wrong to eat all those tiny critters before they’ve had a chance to have fun, to enjoy a meaningful life, and (no doubt most important of all) breed.
Of course, anybody who cares about these things knows that whitebait isn’t a single kind of fish, and in New Zealand (which was the home of most of the websites I found about whitebait sustainability), it’s a term for multiple kinds galaxids, most of them declining or heading for extinction. This is what galaxids look like:
In the UK whitebait tends to be the young of sprats and herrings – which are more ‘sustainable,’ and arguably this gives us a small environmental superiority, though nothing to get smug about.
I do very much like whitebait, but I don’t know that I like them well enough to kill off one or more species for my selfish needs – which of course applies to anything I might eat.
But perhaps this is too much protest, and whitebait is only on my mind because I went to Turtle Bay, a Caribbean restaurant in Walthamstow, part of a small chain - there was no velvet rope on the night I was there
and without thinking about it very much ordered the seafood platter, containing several starters ‘inspired by beach shack and street vendors across the Caribbean islands. Nothing from Guyana then. And here you see the whitebait. There’s other stuff there too, squid, miscellaneous curried fish, a fishy flatbread, and so on, and the whitebait came with a decent jerk mayonnaise.
Actually the best thing we had was the goat curry, but it wasn’t very photogenic, as you see.
And I couldn’t even begin to guess about goat sustainability
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