Ohh... pretty seafood?

About a week plus ago, I was called for an assignment to shoot the Prime Minister's visit to one of Malaysia's most productive prawn farms by JW Aquaculture at Kuala Selangor. It was really an eye-opening experience for me as I have not seen a prawn farm in such a scale before. According to their statistics, the farm is more than 8km long and employs a few hundred employees everyday to tend to them; the prawns are processed on location, packaged and exported to a myriad of locations including Europe, Japan and Korea.

Now... let's go back to the topic: "seafood" .

Being someone who loves seafood, I honestly only like seafood that is fresh from the sea, i.e. "from the wild"; not the farmed or cultured stuff as to me, they lack the "real taste" of seafood.

I am sure many would agree to me in Malaysia where we have access to really good seafood for a relatively low price. As far as in Asia is concerned, the Hong-Kong(ites) are even more interesting, being true connoisseurs of food, they prefer "live" seafood, in other words, fish, prawns and crabs that are still alive right before they were cooked. That, I can attest produces the best tasting seafood.

All that being well and good but do we, the Malaysians ever consider the impacts of our choices? Just reminded by my aunt that seafood is not like it used to be in Malaysia, she said, "You used to get big crabs, now? You only get the small ones~!" and when she went shopping for pomfret, she noticed that the fishmonger was selling tiny little, sauce-plate sized pomfrets... those could have been 9" wide succulent fish in a year or so.

Without sounding overly political, she reminded me of our fishing policies, our choice of "caught-from-the-wild" seafood as well as the prawn farm that I had the pleasure to see a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps it's time for us to consider having tighter and more effective controls on fishing policies for the sake of sustainability so that we can still taste good seafood in the years to come? So that the fishermen of the next generation still has enough to catch? Perhaps it's time for more of us to go into agriculture and aquaculture? And maybe... perhaps it's time for me to tone down my expectations of "good seafood" in the name of conservation and sustainability? Haha... I guess the last point, I shall have to mull over it for a long, long time... :-P