Fishy business

Arriving late from work the other Friday, I decided that the most speedy contribution to my supper of fresh veg already stored in the kitchen, would be hot, battered fish from my lovely local Hanwell  'The Golden Chip' fish and chip shop. Top of the menu was cod and I joined the queue snaking out of the door - Friday is always their busiest night. But my delicious supper got me thinking about an article I read recently about cod numbers falling, not only due to overfishing but also due to warming waters. The British Ecological Society reckons that the great British fish supper could be on the way out, to be replaced with squid and chips. Apparently squid are loving our seawaters which are becoming less hospitable to species such as cod. And if that wasn't worrying enough, another article warned of the possibility of eating plastic with our fish. Millions of tonnes of plastic ends up in the sea each year and fish eat it and we eat the fish. It's found in a third of UK-caught fish such as cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. As well as bottles and bags and the like, microplastics from manufacturing are too small to be filtered out of our waste water systems and that's why huge quantities end up in the sea. To be fair, we'd have to eat massive amounts of fish to be affected but the battle is on worldwide to reduce the use of plastic, to increase its recyclability and so cut down on the amount of plastic waste that ends up in our oceans. It's a major ecological disaster waiting to happen.