30 July 2025

We should be eating oily fish – but what’s the catch?

Politicians have been trying to get us to consume more of the sea’s bounty since the 1500s.

Photo by Nitas / Getty Images

The government has, for some time, been trying to get a reluctant population to eat fish – preferably oily fish such as mackerel, herring or salmon – at least twice a week. It began campaigning around 1563, urging people to add Wednesday as a “fissh daye” to Friday, still observed as a fast day even in newly Protestant England. It was for the national health: not the well-being of individuals, but the country’s economic and military might.

Elizabeth I’s government, flinching at the threat from Spain, aimed to boost “the nursery of the navy”, the fishing fleet. Fish would eke out the nation’s limited beef supplies, in demand from a growing and increasingly wealthy population. But neither fasting nor fish were popular and the policy was dropped.

In the 18th century there was another attempt. Humiliated by defeat in the American War of Independence, parliament looked instead to develop north and west coastal Scotland, which had no large-scale fishing industry. Inconveniently located Highlanders were cleared from their villages in favour of sheep and packed off to the maritime margins to become crofters and fishing folk. The expanding herring industry attracted the attention of Adam Smith. To relieve poverty, he argued, subsidise the small and local. Bounties (subsidies) on huge fishing vessels simply ended up in the pockets of wealthy Londoners.

Those small boats hardly made a dent in Scotland’s vast shoals. Daniel Defoe described the Pentland Firth as “one-third water and two-thirds fish” in the 1720s. Donald Murray’s Herring Tales (2022) describes how young Highlanders and Islanders followed the “numberless armies” throughout the season from Orkney to Lowestoft. For much of the 19th century, netting, gutting, barrelling, curing and selling fish provided jobs (demanding, cold and smelly, as they were) and food through small, usually family-owned boats. The breakfast kipper became part of the much-admired Scottish breakfast (particularly plump, rubicund fish became known as “Glasgow Magistrates”). Smoked fish gave factory workers something “tasty” for their tea, and extra-salted fish were given to enslaved workers in the Caribbean.

Today, we take a “healthy diet” to be a personal matter. But the old sense of the health of the economy is indissoluble from bodily health, thanks to the cost of the NHS. Oily fish – salmon, herrings, sardines, sprats, mackerel – have found themselves recommended anew by government for cardiovascular health, thanks to their micronutrients and Omega-3 – essential fatty acids that our bodies cannot make themselves. Critics and conservationists say that humans should simply eat the source of Omega-3 directly, by eating as far up the food chain as possible. Ditch lice-infested fish-farm salmon; instead eat the tiny silver anchovies, sardines, herring – the small fry that are turned into fishmeal.

This is cheap, healthy fast food (though, admittedly, they can be whiffy in the kitchen). Traditional recipes tend to be quick and uncomplicated: a flash under the grill, some bread, butter and something sharp like lemon, dill pickle, capers, gooseberries or rhubarb. Potatoes often feature. Smoked mackerel flaked into mashed potato make quick fishcakes, without the smell lingering. Both herring and mackerel take kindly to a devil of mustard and cayenne. The Sicilian pasta con le sarde, an ancient, pre-tomato pasta sauce of sardines, fennel, pine nuts and raisins, takes as long to make as pasta takes to boil. A few anchovies, cooked with onions, give an umami boost to a tomato-based sauce.

If there is a lesson in these contrasting stories – the Elizabethan proclamation vs the Adam Smith subsidies – it is that if the legislature wants to change the way the population eats, it must put some money into it; proclamations or their modern equivalent, “guidelines”, don’t work by themselves. So much for our economic and personal health – what about the oceans? Smith was right for a reason he couldn’t have foreseen: small boats don’t wreck the marine ecosystem as huge trawlers do.

If there are to be plenty more fish in the sea – enough for us to eat our two portions a week – small might be the way to go in the kitchen, as it is in water.