Food, oceans, people and ideas. Journalism with a cultural perspective.
Fact Check
Nearly 36 million dead salmon. Tonnes of chemicals. Parasites, pollution and foreign owners. Project Slingshot's campaign against Scottish salmon farming leans on some alarming figures. We checked eleven of its claims against the public record and found real problems, missing context and an industry largely absent from the picture.
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Feature
A tin of sardines used to live at the back of the cupboard. Now it comes with illustrated packaging, a following online and a price closer to a glass of wine. The fish hasn't changed much. Almost everything around it has.
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Feature
At Brixham the auction clock starts at six. By then the night shift has graded, boxed and catalogued the catch, and in 2025 that work added up to a record £77m of fish.
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Behind the Label
Birds Eye invented him in 1967, killed him off in 1971, brought him back in 1974 and has recast him ever since. Captain Birds Eye's long career shows what a mascot can do for frozen fish, and what it can't.
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Explainer
Cameras, sonar and machine learning are getting good at reading a salmon cage. The best results so far come from systems that know their limits, and from farmers who still check their work.
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Explainer
A pollock caught off Russia's Pacific coast can be filleted in China and breaded in Europe. It sounds absurd until you look at how the business of fish actually works.
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Feature
Victorian Londoners ate oysters by the hundred million, often from a barrow in the street. Then the beds ran out, and the oyster became something you dress up for.
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Behind the Label
In Matosinhos, a sardine cannery that nearly closed has turned slow, hand-made production into its strongest selling point. NURI's tins look almost exactly as they always have. The business behind them does not.
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The Fish Files
Salmon is so famously pink that we named a colour after it, yet the fish can't make the pigment itself. Wild or farmed, every pink fillet starts with something a salmon ate.
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Analysis
Thousands of Tube adverts against Scottish salmon and a five-year investigation into the global fishmeal trade have put aquaculture's own account of itself on trial. Some of the criticism oversimplifies. Some of it is right. The industry's credibility depends on telling the difference in public, and on fixing what is broken.
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Analysis
Peru has written off most of its first anchoveta season, fishmeal output is heading for a ten-year low and US forecasters now give better-than-even odds of a record-breaking El Niño. The shock has already reached the feed mill. Shrimp ponds and Pacific fisheries could be next.
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Explainer
Sardines, anchovies and their relatives are some of the most nutritious food in the sea, and among the most caught. Getting more of them onto plates, while still feeding the farms that need them, is one of seafood's quieter opportunities.
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Analysis
Tuna swim through the waters of dozens of countries, so no single government can manage them. The commissions that do have turned one of fishing's worst stories into one of its best, and the job is not finished.
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Explainer
Mangroves raise the young fish and crabs that coastal fisheries live on, and they shelter the ponds that farm shrimp. Shrimp farming once cleared them at scale. Now some of the restoration is being led from shrimp farms.
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The Fish Files
Thousands of fish turn as one, and nobody is giving the orders. The rules behind a school are simple. What they do for the fish, and for the people who catch them, is not.
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Explainer
Affordable seafood is a good thing. But when abuse at sea helps keep prices low, it's the honest operators who pay for it, and fixing that is the industry's job.
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Feature
Seafood passes through far more hands than the one that hauls in the net. On the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the work that decides whether a catch keeps its value happens on the drying ground.
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Feature
Heads, skins, frames and shells can make up most of a fish or shellfish by weight. Farmed and wild processors alike are learning that the leftovers are a second harvest.
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Explainer
Seaweed grows without farmland or fresh water and soaks up carbon as it does. The best evidence so far says it is a valuable crop, but not yet a meaningful way to pull carbon out of the sky.
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Explainer
Microalgae oils, insect proteins and processing leftovers are changing what goes into fish feed. The aim isn't to stop fishing for feed. It's to make every tonne of marine ingredient count for more.
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The Fish Files
Three hearts, blue blood and a nervous system that lives mostly in its arms. The octopus is one of the strangest animals in the sea, and the question of whether it should be farmed has become one of seafood's most heated debates.
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Explainer
For the first time, farms produce more of the world's aquatic animals than fishing boats do. That isn't the end of the wild catch. It's the start of a seafood system that needs both.
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