It's good to know what you're eating in a restaurant. And when you read on the menu "salmon trout" or "sea trout", you are not always getting what is stated. You may be getting another fish altogether: rainbow trout, a species introduced on a big scale to our inland waters not so long ago. It is also good to eat. But, according to SOS, a publication of the Save Our Sea Trout movement, a magistrate in Cornwall imposed a fine of £250 with costs of £400 on a pub which provided rainbow trout while describing it on the menu as being seal trout.
The disappointed diner, says the news item, kept the skin of the fish for identification. And rainbow trout, as many of you know, have a broad purple or lilac tint along the middle of the flank. Unmistakable. "To an epicurean, a sea trout is a better fish" said the prosecution. So it is, but not every pub owner or even restaurant owner may be, so expert. And, again, it could be argued by the same owner that he understood the fish to have been reared in those floating tanks in the sea which are included in the term mariculture. And therefore a sort of sea trout. That well may be. And very good such fish could taste. But sea trout is taken to be a fish of the wild, not subject to artificial feeding nor swimming in water that may have been dosed, and certainly not living in close contact with hundreds if not thousands, of its kind.
All of which is not to say that such rainbow fish are not palatable, or even nourishing. But they should not be labelled sea trout. Next time you choose the sea trout or "salmon trout" option, turn over the skin when you have finished and politely tell the maitre d'hotel or pub owner or whatever, that this is not quite the correct trade description. He wouldn't sell you cod, claiming it was hake, would he? One good thing out of all this explosion of fish breeding is that there is always a plentiful supply of fish in the shops. But the SOS organisation is continuing, with legal procedures against salmon farms which are in the wrong places, as they see it. They reproduce, in this news letter, a map showing the performance and lack of it in various rivers at the mouth of which, or near to which, these farms have been sited.
There are, it is good to see, two fisheries with full recovery, two with good recovery and others with signs of improvement. But too many with no recovery or even deterioration. And we talk of heritage, unspoiled country side and so on.