That is, if your favourite fish is Haddock… And that species is, in fact, preferred by the majority of Fish & Chips aficionados. F&C restaurants across the Maritimes are reporting their fish costs have doubled or more in recent weeks…
Haddock: Cousin of the Cod. Easily differentiated by its taller, pointed front dorsal fin…
… And the phenomenon is not confined to the East Coast. It’s just taking a little longer to reach Cent-ral Canada. And the F&C purveyors are quick to blame the Feds for the crisis.
The CBC reports, “A tightened haddock supply is to blame for the price surge. In April, the Depart-ment of Fisheries and Oceans cut haddock fishing quotas in areas off southwestern Nova Scotia, southern New Brunswick and the Gulf of Maine by 57 per cent, citing a decade-long decline in stocks.”
Restos are reeling
The Pleasant Street Diner in Dartmouth, NS, goes through about 1,000 lb (450 kg) of fresh haddock per week. Without warning, their supplier upped the price of Haddock by 40 percent – about $5 per pound. And the resto’s weekly Haddock expenses went up $5,000 instantly.
Haddock dishes make up make up more than half of Pleasant Street’s menu, so the increase is no small matter. Co-owners Stephen and Tommy Fatouros say they’ve had to jack up menu prices by 10 percent, but feel they don’t dare go higher…
“If we didn’t raise our prices, you know, we’d have to take fish and chips off the menu,” Stephen says. “We don’t want to use an inferior product or even make our orders smaller. We always felt that the customer doesn’t mind paying a little extra if the product is the same and the quality is the same.”
NS Restos already struggling
Natasha Chestnut, Executive Director of the Restaurant Association of Nova Scotia, told CBC, restaur-ateurs have largely absorbed increased fuel, labour, food and processing costs without passing them on to customers, but many are now reaching a breaking point. More than a third – 36 percent – of Nova Scotia’s restaurants are operating at a loss or just breaking even, which is three times as many as in 2019.
Chestnut predicts Haddock will soon disappear from resto menus altogether. There’s a precedent: Scallops – a cherished East Coast treat – have already been dropped by most Nova Scotia seafood restos due to soaring costs. The feds cut quotas for that catch by 48 percent earlier this year.
My take
Why didn’t the feds see this disaster coming, and address the situation sooner? An earlier, less-drastic reduction might have helped the struggling haddock stocks firm up without endangering the economically vital East Coast fishery. And disappointing millions of Canadian Fish and Chips fanciers.
All this, of course, is happening in the midst of a food price crisis. In fact, another federal agency – Competition Bureau Canada – has just launched a major probe into unrelenting high food prices. It’s really sad – tragic, actually – to see federal government regulators working at cross purposes, espec-ially in such a vital area as food supply sustainability…
~ Maggie J.