Home thoughts

Nick Joy is not against regulation but, he argues, it would be good to have a clear timetable for any reforms. Here I am, sitting on a big ferry, returning from a week in Portugal. Ferries are hardly new to me, but it’s somewhat comfortable being on a known commodity returning from a holiday that…

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Shades of green

The platform thrashed out by the SNP and the Scottish Greens is dangerously vague, argues Hamish Macdonell It’s all in the detail. Or, rather, in the case of the SNP-Green deal, perhaps it isn’t. The coalition that isn’t, announced last month, was hardly unexpected. It had been trailed for weeks as the two parties conducted…

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The truth about lice

If you had to urgently find a person who would help save your life and knew nothing about them, then what you might do is to go out into the street and stop everyone who passed by in the hope of bumping into them. However, you could be looking for ever. It might be better…

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Unintended consequences

When all of this palaver started about coronavirus, writes Nick Joy, I was one of the people who consistently mispredicted what the outcomes would be. I simply could not believe that any government, whatever the shade, would be dim enough to shut down the economy. Even at the beginning the average age of people dying…

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All eyes on Glasgow

You have to go back 16 years to find the last time Scotland hosted an event with as much global significance and profile as the COP26 summit, due to be held in Glasgow this November. In 2005, it was the G8 at Gleneagles. I remember it well as I was part of the media swarm…

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Signs of good breeding

Reading the papers has been interesting in the last few weeks, writes Nick Joy, but nothing caught my eye so much as several articles discussing trying to bring taste back into food. Finally the supermarkets, allied to some food producers, are beginning to realise no one wants to eat bland food. In the old days…

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Fishy statistics

Dr Martin Jaffa asks: has the pandemic reversed the long decline in fresh fish consumption? A new report commissioned by the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) would seem to suggest that home consumption of fish and seafood has risen during the ongoing pandemic. They believe that this has been fuelled by a move away from…

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Never-ending Brexit

The UK’s European divorce continues to have repercussions for the salmon industry It always used to be said that Scottish devolution was “a process not an event”. Well, it seems that the same can now be said for Brexit. Anyone who adhered to the clean-break theory for our departure from the EU is being proved…

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Huffing and puffin

Our favourite seabirds are facing a shortage of sand eels, but please don’t blame the fish farmers. On 15 May 2021, the Herald newspaper included a two-page commercial feature placed by the Coastal Communities Network who claim that the safety of Scottish water is being compromised as the economic drivers of open cage salmon farming…

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The feed conundrum

There have been great strides forward in aquafeed, but the industry will need to continue looking for even better solutions. When I was first in the industry, feed was pelletised not extruded. It sank like a stone in the pens. The pellets were so hard that you couldn’t break them, though they still seemed to…

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