My ambitions for 2022 amount to little more than our young football team winning the World Cup in Qatar, and neither Boris Johnson nor Liz Truss being my prime minister by the end of it. There are a few other minor things but, fundamentally, I want to keep things modest, and read as many books as the 365 days will allow.
On page 279 of the book I am currently reading, there is a strangely beautiful image of eight dead puffins. A few pages later, there follows a recipe for puffin stuffed with cake, in addition to one for braised northern fulmar chicks, roasted guillemot with brown gravy and fulmar eggs in a curry cream source.
The Nordic Cook Book, which runs to nearly 800 pages, is a 2015 masterpiece that covers one and a half million square miles of food from eastern Finland to the outer islands of Iceland. Written by Michelin starred chef Magnus Nilsson, it is as much a work of historical research as it is a book of recipes. And you probably guessed by now that the seabird recipes came from the Faroe Islands.
It’s very easy for people from our own islands, (me included), to roll their eyes in shock that someone might actually want to eat a bird like a puffin, especially one that is red-listed in our own country after years of plunging populations, just as it is tempting to assume that all the NHS’s problems can be sorted by pouring more money in, or that banning flights (2% of global emissions) is the priority for sorting climate change. It seems that we are always tempted by the eye catching changes, rather than the trickier and more nuanced ones. Unfortunately, things are often more complex than the obvious solution, and nearly right doesn’t mean completely right.
Having spent eighteen months researching a book on cattle (Taking Stock; June 2 2022, and thank you for asking!), I lost count of the number of times people asked me if I didn’t think it would be better if we all just gave up meat, especially beef. There was this cloud of doubt that a pasture-fed cow, raised extensively on a rainy, grassy, stable British field, and then slaughtered and sold locally, might actually be less damaging to the world than, say, a Brazilian one kept and fed on cleared rain forests, or one in an Iowan feedlot, pumped full of God knows what to get it to the burger bar in the shortest possible time. Without giving away the ending, there happens to be quite a lot more to cows than the consequences of their farting.
But back to those puffins. The idea of a dead puffin lying on the sideboard of my kitchen, ready to be popped in a stew, fills me with a real revulsion. However, there are only 49,000 people on the Faroe Islands, a healthy puffin population and a strictly controlled hunting season when they can be taken. Besides, it is a part of their cultural heritage that is too deep ingrained for strangers like me to understand. I suspect that, like the violent spectacle of bullfighting, it will eventually just become inappropriate, and finish.
And anyway, the real problem for British puffins (whose Latin name of fratercula arctica means ‘little brother of the north’) has rather more to do with the way our world has chosen to live in the last hundred and fifty years, and is of rather more consequence than a few going to the table. You see, the puffin has just the one food source, sand eels. And if we have displaced the sand eels by warming our oceans, and if we allow trawlers to rip through the local sand eel population to pulp them up and feed them to farmed salmon that we can buy cheap in our supermarkets, then we really shouldn’t be surprised if the puffin population crashes. And I can look disapprovingly up to the Faroes as much as I like, but it won’t change the fact that we are killing our own puffins off in a far more effective way, so I might as well keep trying to change my own behaviour first.
And with that notion that our world is wonderfully complex, contradictory and full of opportunities, may I wish you the happiest, healthiest and (dare I say) most normal of years to come.
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