Well, if it wasnt bad enought that Jamie Oliver is promoting farmed salmon his restaurants are trying to buy illegaly rod caught salmon.
Taken from The Mirror, terrible paper but good for my needs
JAMIE’S HOOKED
Feb 2 2004
Our Palace footman Ryan Parry sells ‘dodgy’ salmon to TV chef Oliver’s restaurant.. no questions asked
TOP CHEF Jamie Oliver’s restaurant is today exposed for buying illegal wild salmon in dodgy “no-questions-asked” cash deals.
Staff at the TV chef’s trendy restaurant Fifteen were happy to buy the fish from a complete stranger out the back of a car.
And amazingly, they did not ask for proof of origin or any guarantee that the salmon had been refrigerated properly.
A spokesman for the restaurant later claimed they had bought the fish purely for training purposes and it wouldn’t have been eaten by customers. Yet every other top restaurant we approached rejected our salmon out of hand.
Fifteen became the most famous restaurant in Britain after a fly-on-the-wall documentary followed Jamie training 15 youngsters to become chefs.
But in a Daily Mirror investigation, in which I offered top restaurants cheap “rod-caught salmon”, Fifteen was the only restaurant to buy our fish without questioning its source.
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I told each restaurant that I could get 15-20lbs fresh water salmon from Loch Lomond in Scotland for a mere £30-£40 a fish.
“It’s wild, rod-caught salmon, trucked down from Loch Lomond,” I told Tommy, a sous-chef at Fifteen.
In fact there is now a bit of a debate going on over at Jamie Olivers forums where Mr Oliver actually replied to the debate about him doing the Sainsburys advert!
Posted on: 03.12.04 6.11pm GMT
Whenever I’m asked to do food ads for Sainsburys, I get my food team to do research into it first before I commit to doing anything, but even though they gave me the green light I arrived at the fish farm to do the ad with a load of questions to ask, as in the past I’ve been appalled by irresponsible fish farming and the poor hygene, low quality produst and lack of environmental common sense associated with it.
I witnessed every stage of the production and was impressed with the innovations and improvements they’d introduced The sea loch they use to farm the fish has good natural currents which the fish swim against, 10% of their diets is natural from the loch itself, the stocking density of the fish is way lower than legally required, the loch is cleaned regularly, the nets are monitored and cleaned regularly and the health of the fish is monitored closely by a vet who I spent time walking round the farm with looking at the fish. None were lice infested, none were in distress, they are better looked after and checked more often than a lot of other farmed animals in the country.
In a perfect world of course all salmon we would eat would be wild, but that’s just not realistic. People like fish, and it’s very good for them, we should be encouraging them to eat responsibly carefully farmed fish not making it expensive and difficult to get hold of. I’d much rather the public ate this quality of salmon than none at all.
I know that there have been horror stories about fish farming in the past, but I think this new style of farming is really moving in the right direction, and I like the product – if I didn’t, I’d just tell Sainsburys that I wasn’t going to make the ad, simple as that.
One point ………how the heck do you clean out a loch??? if that is made up then the rest is probably made up as well.
Good grief! I made a post about the mirror allegation and guess what……..it was removed!! I actually posted it again ….and it was removed again!!!!!! Something they dont want Jamie Olivers fans to know methinks????