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waste there was from each fish. From a 6-7kg cod there was maybe around 50g of waste. so after the fillets had been taken off, the heads were packaged up for people to make soup and suck off the flesh, and then all the offal was prepared for selling and cooking – heart, stomach, roe, gills, bones, eyes, even sperm sacks(the highly prized chrysanthemum, as it looks like a flower head). truly nose to tail eating on a fishy scale. After all the work was done, the crew
then cooked breakfast (that day, cod sashimi and fish soup with rice) and sat down together to eat, a good way to share any news and air any problems, over a meal of the freshest fish. this was fishing on a small scale and at
the very farthest end of the scale compared to the volume of fish we saw being sold in tokyo’s famous tsukiji fish market, the world’s largest. An early start of 3am meant we just managed to get in to see the tuna auction – a remarkable sight of the daily thousand tuna of 100kg each, being sold at 3000-5000 yen per kilo. the tuna auction alone turns over $30 million weekly so that gives you an idea of the volume when Brixham Fish Market’s turnover is around £32 million annually.
After the auction we visited the wholesale/retail market, much more like Billingsgate but again, on a vast scale with a warren of lanes holding hundreds of stands selling to the trade and public. Literally everything you can catch was being sold from volumes of squid, octopus and cuttlefish, crab, scallops, whelks and other shellfish, to all manner of white and oily fish and a vast selection of sea vegetables and seafood – sea cucumber anyone? (actually delicious served raw with a shaving of grapefruity yuzo zest). the tuna we’d seen at auction was now being filleted with care and enormous 4-5 foot knives. the word is that Japan’s annual
consumption of fish is falling from a peak of over 40kg to a current 27kg per person compared to a global average of around 19kg. Despite this, I witnessed a relish for
all things fishy from people in every age bracket. My last meal in Japan at a slightly scruffy east end tokyo pub bore witness to this – 2 big u-shaped tables squashed in the room with 2 waiters barking orders at the kitchen and customers, and an endless queue of people waiting patiently to eat every kind of fish cooked every kind of way. Delicious. •
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