There’s no way of telling your partner you’re off to a lake near Belfast to spend the night with a man called Gary without rousing suspicion. However, the purpose of my visit could not be further from a steamy love affair – I’m off to fish for eel on Lough Neagh. Call me Don Juan.
This 152-square-mile lake is Europe’s largest remaining wild eel fishery and the only place post-Brexit permitted to sell eel to both the UK and EU. Like many on the lough, Gary McErlain is a member of a long line of fishermen dating back seven generations. He’s been fishing these waters since he was 14 years old; his father since he was 12. We walk to a wooden outhouse by the side of the lough, and he shines a head torch at a wall lined with framed pictures, including a black-and-white photo taken in 1910 of an old woman proudly holding a fish. Her name is Sally-Anne Murphy, and she’s the fourth generation of fishermen in Gary’s family. She never got married, never had children, survived the famine and lived to over 100. “It’s all the oily fish!” claims Gary.
Whether Miss Murphy’s eel consumption contributed to her lengthy stint on planet Earth is yet to be confirmed – but we can be sure that Lough Neagh’s eels are oilier than most. According to Gary’s wife, Anne Marie, of all the European eels that migrate from the Sargasso Sea, you’ve won the lottery if you wind up in Lough Neagh. The waters have historically teemed with lough fly larvae – super oily insects that the eel thrive on. Eels fished from these waters are considered superior to consume.
Their 30% higher omega-3 content and buttery, rich flavour have granted them PGI status, putting them in the same bucket as chianti, comté, and parma ham. Gary eats his Lough Neagh eel the traditional Irish way: pan-fried with a little salt and served with soda farls or wheaten bread.
Sorting eel by size on a metal table
Christy Spring
We jump aboard his blue fishing boat and head out onto the lough at dusk, monitoring a fishing sonar, on the hunt for eel snaking the lake bed. Doing God’s work, I valiantly take my position as passenger princess, sitting on a wooden stool demolishing a bag of thick chip shop chips while Gary and Anne Marie scamper around the vessel, throwing out a basket-shaped net and hauling it in wearing a pair of luminous pink marigolds. By 11pm we disembark by the shore, and Gary takes me to a large metal pot poked with holes nearby. In true Blue Peter fashion, he opens its lid to reveal a tangled heap of eels he’d caught that morning, manically squirming over each other. As you might tip a heap of spaghetti from saucepan to colander, he pours the eel onto a metal table, ready to sort them by size (anything under 14 inches gets thrown back into the lough). He points out a few silver-bellied, large-eyed eels that look different from the pack. These are migrator eels who have undergone metamorphosis in preparation to embark on the 4,000-mile swim back to where they were born in the Sargasso Sea.
For those who don’t know, the life cycle of a European eel is nothing short of a miracle. They are one of the most enigmatic creatures in the world in terms of breeding knowledge, alongside cephalopods and deep sea fish. Even Sigmund Freud, who dedicated years of his life trying to suss out how these sea snakes canoodle (how, er, Freudian), couldn’t crack the code.
They start their lives in the Sargasso Sea near the Bermuda Triangle and use their willow-leaf-shaped bodies, alongside a magnetic “sixth sense” that enables them to detect changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, to hitch a ride on the Gulf Stream towards Blighty. On arrival, they transform into freshwater glass eels and swim upriver. Gaining pigment, these guys spend decades in rivers, streams and lakes until, at some point in their life on a moonless night (no one knows why), they feel an overwhelming urge to return to the Sargasso.
In Lough Neagh, this migration commences on a day called the Fifteenth Dark around mid-August and continues to around the time of Halloween, or sometimes as late as December. In some Incredible Hulk-esque metamorphosis, their eyes double in size, their pectoral fin enlarges, and their digestive system completely shuts down to dedicate energy to developing sexual organs. They swim (in their thousands) from the lough up the River Bann back to the place it all began near the Caribbean. No one knows exactly where they spawn, but we know once they’ve done the deed, they die. Catch an eel, put it in a tank, and try to make it breed in captivity, and it, too, will die.
Gary McErlain casting out an eel fishing net on Lough Neagh
Christy Spring
This inability to breed eels in captivity, married with their now critically endangered status as European eel populations have declined by 95% since the 1980s, means the notion of eating eel has become divisive. While the relationship between Brits and eel is increasingly divorced, we were once a nation that ran on eel, and for the folk on Lough Neagh, it’s a sacred creature. Life here has historically been tough, and survival for generations through hardship (not to mention the Irish Potato Famine) has been supported by the presence of eel in these waters.
The tension surrounding eel in the lough was brewing long before the decline in eel populations. The Earl of Shaftesbury, who owns the lough’s bed, was eager to capitalise on the increasingly lucrative sale of eel to London, so completely banned fishing from 1885 to 1966. “He kicked my ancestors off Lough Neagh. It was all people knew and how they put bread on the table. People risked losing everything if they were caught fishing. Some were even left to drown,” says Gary.
Although fishing is now permitted again, contemporary times present a new set of struggles: an increasing amount of man-made architecture in rivers blocks the path of eel from the River Bann to the Lough; algal blooms caused by pollution upstream make the lake hypoxic, destroying its wildlife (including the all-important lough flies); and the number of Lough Neagh fishermen is dwindling. When Gary was small, the fleet of fishing boats was 200-strong. Now, there are just 50 or 60, as younger generations look for more reliable, stable forms of employment.
Gangs who smuggle eel from Europe to Asia can fetch over £4,000 a kilogram
The turmoil associated with the eel industry isn’t isolated to Lough Neagh either. The rise of elvers (baby eels) as a prized delicacy across Asia and parts of Europe, combined with strict regulation by the EU to prevent eel population decline, means that they are now the most trafficked animal in the world (yep, you heard me right). Criminal gangs who smuggle eel from Europe to Asia can fetch over £4,000 a kilogram, making it one of the most substantial and lucrative illegal trades of a protected species. If you think this all sounds a little out of hand, you’ll fall off your seat when you find out a New York Times investigation into the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse shows that the magnicide was likely linked to eel trafficking gangs in the country.
A potential solution to this minefield lies in the advent of the first lab-grown eel meat from cultivated eel cells by cultured fish and seafood company Forsea Foods. But what does that mean for individuals whose existence relies on eels? And equally for a country whose history and culture are deeply intertwined with these mistifying aquatic snakes?
A nation that ran on eel
For a creature so extraordinary, eels have been an everyday part of Britain’s history for centuries, on our plates and beyond. They feature in the Bayeux Tapestry, crop up in Shakespeare’s writing more than any other fish and were a godsend for Catholic monks needing for a Lent-appropriate, low-cost meal. In Medieval times eels were currency to pay rent, tax, debts and other financial transactions. By the time the Domesday Book survey was undertaken in 1086, it is thought that over half a million eels were paid in rent in England. Imagine paying for your one-bedroom flat in Camberwell with a box of fish fingers?
Fast-forward to the 20th century, and eels were firmly London’s favourite fast food. In the same way modern British society survives off Greggs steak bakes and the 99p mayo chicken, London ran on eels – eaten live or jellied. Eel consumption rocketed as an affordable, abundant protein hoiked out of the Thames, particularly among London’s worst off. It was a cockney staple, consumed in pie and mash shops, which, by the end of WWII, when their popularity peaked, was a force of over 100.
To get the knowledge on all things aspic, I head to Billingsgate Market to talk jellied eel with Mark Button – head honcho at Barney’s Eels, who I’m informed has been “in and around eels his whole life” (I won’t ask what the former entails). We sit in the rain side by side on a wooden pallet next to Barney’s HQ – a corrugated metal unit filled with fridges of crabs, polystyrene boxes and a black and white photo of Sophia Loren stood next to the Tubby Isaac’s and Barney’s Eels stalls taken in 1960.
Italian actress Sophia Loren on the set of film The Millionairess stood next to the Tubby Isaac’s and Barney’s Eels stalls at Billingsgate Market in 1960
Barney’s has been around since the early 1960s, but from a wholesale point of view, the stall Barney’s and Tubby Isaacs were both at Aldgate in the early 1900s. Eels weren’t on ration during the war, so the guys had a thriving, very private trade, selling around four or five different items over the years,” says Button. “I first started in 1983 when the market moved from Lower Thames Street to the current site here at Canary Wharf, and in those days, we were processing over a tonne of eel a day. Most of the raw materials came from the Thames Estuary, where two boats would trawl the river. They’d bring them to London every night for us to process and jelly.”
But times have changed. London’s voracious appetite for jellied eel has dwindled, and their abundance in the Thames is no more. Button tells me jellied eel is a declining industry, “You can tell by true volumes and the people that eat them. We might get about 800 kilos of eel a week now, where once upon a time, I used to process that in a day.”
The exodus of eel from the Thames is thought to be caused by the rise in artificial river structures like dams, diseases, parasites, pollution and the impact of climate change on ocean currents. Combine these plummeting numbers with Brexit, and eel must now be flown in from far-flung places to produce a once local, low-cost cockney dish. “I’ve been flying eels in from New Zealand live once a week,” says Button. “It’s a hell of a lot more expensive because of the cost of air freight. There are itinerary fees, customs fees, handling fees, and it’s costly to send a van to collect them, which can take five or six hours each way, depending on delays.”
It’s a unique and difficult-to-navigate situation when the food that rose to popularity because it was cheap and plentiful becomes critically endangered and expensive
There are also changing tastes, explains Button. “My father used to work at a pie and mash shop chopping up live eel for every person that queued – but that population that used to love eel doesn’t exist today”. It’s partly because you’re not allowed to sell live imported eels in case you plop them into our waterways and wreak havoc on the delicate equilibrium of these ecosystems and also because London’s fast food scene has erupted with choice over the past 60 years. “When my father had a stall in the 1960s, there weren’t too many other takeaway-type foods. In Aldgate, it was us and Blooms – a kosher restaurant selling salt beef that’s been there since the early 1900s.” Now that London can offer a lahmacun, dosa or kung po chicken for a fiver, I think we can all agree the allure of a cold, aspic-enshrined eel is less tempting.
It’s a unique and difficult-to-navigate situation when the food that rose to popularity because it was cheap and plentiful becomes critically endangered and expensive, particularly when it has become entrenched in the history and traditions of a city, where numerous family businesses depend upon it. Survival is now a case of diversifying in two ways: 1) follow in Button’s footsteps and expand your seafood offering from 20 to 350 different types; 2) Do what father-son duo and owners of The Devon Eel Company Ben and Neil Fuzzard did and sell a far more lucrative, in-demand form of eel. The smoked kind.
A reputational overhaul
Smoked eel, more traditionally consumed across Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, has wended its way onto the menus of London’s best restaurants. Not associated with the squeamish connotations of its jelly-entombed cousin, this delicacy, with its high fat content, renderable skin and singular bone, is the restaurant equivalent of Taylor Swift tickets. Quo Vadis, Portland, Orasay, St John, Fallow, Murano, you name it – they’re cooking it, and more often than not, it comes from The Devon Eel Company, which supplies to over 50 Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK.
“It’s the bacon of the river!” laughs Elliot Hashtroudi, head chef at French restaurant Camille, who features smoked eel devilled eggs and smoked eel cream on his menu. “There’s a lot of smoked fish on the market like salmon or trout, but eel is the premium, and that’s reflected in the higher price. I’ve worked at St John, Padella and Trullo and have always cooked with eel. The first time I had it, it blew my mind. It’s got a fattiness and umami flavour like nothing else.”
Smoked eel devilled eggs served at French Restaurant Camille in Borough Market, made using eel from The Devon Eel Company
Mind-blowing is undoubtedly the right word. I remember my inaugural foray with smoked eel during my first visit to Quo Vadis. I, too, was in the camp that eel was more yuck than yum. Presented with the iconic smoked eel sandwich as a kind of food writer’s rite of passage by my colleague, I took a bite of the beast and was immediately converted. It’s an unctuous, decadent combination of smoked eel, a lick of horseradish cream, several fronds of onion pickle and two lightly toasted slices of Poilâne sourdough. An experience that couldn’t be further from how eel was consumed in Britain a century prior.
I travelled to The Devon Eel Company near Axminster to see the smokery in the flesh. It’s a dinky single-story building set among lakes of carp, with a massive black metal smoker at its core. Ben Fuzzard, who previously worked as a chef before hanging up his apron in 2020 to work with his dad on this joint venture, opens the smokery door to door to reveal rows of eel hanging from hooks like thick, meaty scarves.
Smoked eel, with its high fat content, is the restaurant equivalent of Taylor Swift tickets
Despite being able to sell smoked eel at a higher price to jellied, alongside having a larger market beyond British pie and mash shops, seafood shacks and cockney-themed parties,The Devon Eel company, too, has been majorly hindered by Brexit. Fuzzard takes me to a large walk-in freezer filled with polystyrene boxes of eel – a sight you would not have seen before 2017 when they used to import live eel from the Netherlands. Since Brexit, he must now ship in frozen eel from China. A worse product, sold at a higher price.
Fortunately, a lifeline has presented itself in the form of a newly opened eel farm in Morocco called Nounemaroc. This farm abides by the same regulations and standards as The Devon Eel Company does, as outlined by the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG). But this then raises the question of whether farming an endangered animal that can’t be bred in captivity can ever be classified as sustainable.
Should we be eating eel?
Broaching the subject of eating eel is like talking politics at Christmas dinner. You’d rather not. Making a black rhino parmigiana or pangolin goujons wouldn’t sit well with most, so why are we fine with slapping eel in a sando? When you think about it, consuming a critically endangered fish when we have an abundance of the non-critically endangered ones does seem a tad unnecessary.
That’s the premise behind Forsea Foods, a company that identifies industry bottlenecks for high-value fish or seafood with substantial market potential and produces equivalents from cultivated cells in a lab. The eel, which has a market potential of over $1 billion and critically endangered status, is evidently the perfect candidate. By sourcing stem cells from eel eggs after fertilisation, the company establishes cell lines, proliferates them many times and creates an organoid with the same natural composition as the eel cells meaning identical fat, muscle and extracellular matrix, co-founder and CEO Roee Nir tells me. The company’s main markets for cultivated eel meat are Japan, with its insatiable appetite for unagi, alongside Europe, and the plan is to have the product on our shelves by 2026, with price parity achieved by 2029 latest.
The first edible prototypes of Forsea Food’s cultivated eel meat served at a tasting event
This is an undeniably impressive and innovative venture, with heroic potential to save a disappearing species – but it’s not without its sceptics. In the wake of the backlash against ultra-processed food, people’s desire to eat lab-grown nosh is tepid. Elliot from Camille feels this way. “I respect the sustainability side, but I feel like if a product needs to come from nature, that’s how it is meant to be and how it’s intended. If there comes an issue where something becomes unsustainable then the fashion needs to change. There’s so much beauty in vegetables and in non-lab-grown food, it’s better to get creative than lean on fake meat.” Others in the eel industry were more receptive, however. Button from Barney’s Eels and Fuzzard from the Devon Eel Company were both keen to smoke or jelly the product as long as it was identical in taste quality and texture and no more expensive than buying the real deal.
But is eating eel really as problematic as it seems? I caught up with Andrew Kerr, chair of the SEG, who thinks otherwise. “Even though it’s critically endangered, we still get 1.3 billion glass eels coming into Europe a year. And the commercial eel sector uses just 3%,” says Kerr. The main driver of the decline in eel populations is the rapid engineering of our waterways over the past century. Dams, irrigation and blockages prevent eel from migrating to and from the Sargasso Sea. And if they can’t get there, they can’t spawn.
The SEG, which was formed in response to the 2007 EU legislation mandating that all member states implement an eel management plan to reduce species mortality, has always operated on the basis that restoring eel numbers needs to follow the Brundtland definition of sustainability, balancing environmental, social, and economic agendas.
A Forsea Foods tasting event trying the first eel meat made from cultivated cells
“It’s so easy to just ban commercial eel fishing and pretend you’re green and saving eel, but you’re not at all. It just makes the operation go underground,” says Kerr. “The SEG is about transparency, traceability and trying to reinvent a commercial eel industry that was dysfunctional because it was built on superabundance.”
The strategies put in place by the SEG have proved effective, too. The fishing and catching process that was once so wildly inefficient that fishermen were killing over half of the eels they netted is down to just 5% between net and plate in SEG fisheries. 88% of fishermen in France are now certified with the program, and 125 million glass eels go through their supply chain yearly for aquaculture and a sizeable restocking programme.
For Kerr, the future of the European eel will always include eating them because it’s part of our historic, romantic connection with these mysterious sea snakes. Considering they’ve been on the planet for millions of years and our relationship with them has only gone south in the past century, there’s every reason to bring back harmony for the sake of our convoluted history and those whose livelihoods depend upon them. As for the future of the Quo Vadis eel sandwich? That warrants safeguarding too.
