The Source

Food is never just food. To mark Love British Food’s 25th anniversary, Love British Food and Future Countryside have commissioned a collection of essays exploring the role of food in Britain today. Bringing together diverse perspectives from across the food supply chain and beyond, the collection provides a snapshot of British food and society in 2026 – designed to inspire fresh thinking, worthwhile debate and positive action for the future. 

Britain’s seas: a nature reserve or a provider of fish for our plates?

For generations, since time immemorial, the men and women of our coastal communities have earned a living from the harvest of the sea. Species have come and gone with varying prolificacy and abundance, but our fishermen have always adapted, to change with the cyclical and seasonal nature of the oceans and their toils over centuries, have not only provided us with a steady and seemingly infinite source of wild protein, but have etched into our coastline the ports, villages, harbours, staithes and beach scenes that so many of us willingly flock to.

And it continues, to a degree, but our fleets, a shadow of their former selves even in a generation, are under ever increasing threats to their very existence and by definition, ours likewise. At the turn of the 20th century, 15,000 souls were engaged in the herring fishery - a species in such abundance, it merited its own marketing board and processing infrastructure, such was the demand for the ‘Silver Darlings’, both home and abroad. Now the UK fishing fleet is lucky if it can muster 8000 fishermen across all sectors and increasingly, their job, like their agricultural counterparts, the farmers, is becoming more and more burdensome, regulated and disapproved of societally.

But why? Why discourage the very means by which as a nation we’re sustained? Why import 80% of the seafood that we consume, often from countries where welfare and production standards fall way below those of our own producers? Why then designate our own, increasingly responsibly and sustainably fished and managed shallow seas, as areas where fishing effort should ultimately be avoided at all costs, in the pursuit of some ecological nirvana?

Sadly and catastrophically for not just us, but our future generations, national food security has been stigmatised out of all policy discussions and conversations under immense and burgeoning ideological threats, from organisations that continually try to find reasons to justify their existence and moreover their funding streams.

Like agriculture, the very engine room and source of our food, the land and the sea, are both managed environments like it or not and have been ever since man first cast a net or line, drew a furrow or grazed a natural heathland. Indeed, so dependent are the myriad ecosystems that define our countryside and inshore waters, on our farmers and fishermen to steward and manage them, that as soon as they are withdrawn, then the ecological balance tips strongly in favour of dominant species which then displace many elements of the environment, that these schemes, however well intentioned, were designed to protect.

Sustainability is an oft-used word nowadays, glibly thrown about without due reference to its actually meaning and its connotations. It trips off the tongue whenever an ecological problem needs addressing without considering the individual pillars that overarch its underlying ethos. For seafood production, both wild capture and aquaculture, sustainability dives much deeper that just the abundance of wild fish populations or the ability of a species to provide a managed source of food via an artificial system.

Critically, it also concerns the viability of the businesses engaged in its harvest and the socio-economics and welfare of the communities associated with it - be they rural or coastal. Sustainability is ultimately about balance and harmony. Sustainable food production, that in the case of our native fish and shellfish, is a concept which does not take more out of the system than can be naturally replaced aka ‘maximum sustainable yield’ and although essentially a ‘wild’ environment, our seas have to be managed to just the same extent as farms, if that balance is to be maintained.

Blue food, has recently become a watch word, it represents not just the healthy and nutritious characteristics of seafood that have become so apparent in recent years, but also the ridiculously small environmental footprint that accompanies our domestic seafood production, compared to other marine activity - offshore energy and its vast infrastructure, gravel extraction, subsea mining, dredging and silt removal, commercial shipping and recreational boating, all affect the marine environment in ways we choose to ignore and even though necessary and vital to trade and sustainability themselves, do nothing to maintain, conserve or steward those natural systems, not like our fishing communities, whose innate knowledge, heritage, culture and experience, like their farming counterparts, is ignored at our peril.

So detached have we become as a society from our food sources, that their methods and systems when described are often anathema to those who don’t understand or even wish to learn. Food production is an essential part of our society, Britain’s seas are part of that production powerhouse just as is our farmland. Between them they provide national nutrition, wellbeing and security.

However, we only have the diversity and proportionate balance of species in our ecosystems, because of that production and its management and a wise man would recognise that when left to the experts, those who posses that generational knowledge of how to farm and fish, then the land and the sea when managed correctly, can not just be a responsibly harvested source of food for us, but a biodiverse and eclectic backdrop, which demands a level of stewardship, of course underpinned by science, but presided over by its custodians, our fishermen and farmers.