The Wholesome Herring
The annual report of the Herring Industry Board shows that the home-demand for herrings has fallen by one-third in the past two years. This is an alarming state of affairs for an industry which is facing increased foreign competition, and in which there have always been too many bankruptcies to encourage much sense of security. To a certain extent the discomfiture of the herring was inevitable. For it, as for a good many human beings, the war was a period of inflated importance, and the peace has meant a period of rehabilitation and adjustment. The obstacles against which the herring has now to compete are numerous. Alternative foods are available to oust it from the breakfast and dinner table ; the fish-eating habits of the war-time English became a bad joke which has now to be lived down, and the herring (since it cannot be deep-fried and wrapped up in newspaper) is the first sufferer from the reaction. It is apparently no use telling the public, as the Ministry of Food has been doing for some time, that properly cooked a fresh herring is as delicious a fish as any that comes out of the sea. The answer to that is simple: the English cannot cook and the herrings are usually not fresh. It is obviously beyond the capacity of the Ministry and the herring industry to teach the English how to cook, but it should not be beyond their combined efforts to ensure that only fish of the very best quality gets into the hands of the retailers. This raises problems of distribution which are common to the fish industry as a whole, and of course it is not only herrings that are suffering from a post-war slump or from the threat of over-fishing and foreign competition.
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