I have been following Channel Four’s Fish Fight campaign, and last night I saw this programme: Dispatches – Fish Unwrapped about the shady goings-on within the fish industry.
One anecdote in particular caught my attention: we were shown a bag of “wholetails of scampi coated in crispy breadcrumbs” and then told not to expect the product to contain any whole scampi tails! Apparently, according to the law the bag would be labelled “single wholetails of scampi” if this were the case.
It may be legal and all but I find this practice massively disingenuous. After all, the words ‘whole’ and ‘tail’ are pretty self-explanatory. No one is psychic, and expecting the buying public to instinctively know that “wholetail” actually means “bits of tail that are above the minimum legal size” is asking an awful lot.
Whose side is the law on exactly? What is the point of having regulations if there is so much wiggle room with no obligation to inform buyers that they’re basically being misled?