There is no such thing as farmed eel—they are caught in the wild.

Before we know it, the year’s first Christmas lunches will soon be appearing on calendars around the country. A classic on the table is smoked eel—and that is something we really need to talk about. Smoked eel comes from a critically endangered species. How threatened a species is, is measured on a scale ranging from “everything is fine” to “completely extinct.” “Critically endangered” is the level immediately before extinction. Other species in this category include the black rhinoceros, the Sumatran orangutan, and the Amur leopard. The panda you know from Copenhagen Zoo is only “vulnerable”—two levels below “critically endangered.” The European eel has existed as a species for 40 million years, which makes it quite remarkable that more than nine out of ten European eels have disappeared in just the last 40 years. You may already know this, and you do not want to eat a species that is under such pressure. You see that someone is selling “farmed eel,” so you buy that instead. As long as they are not wild-caught, that is presumably fine, right? That is where you are mistaken. There is no such thing as farmed eel—not at least in the sense in which I understand the term. No one has yet succeeded in getting eels to reproduce successfully in captivity. The eels referred to as “farmed” are wild-caught young eels, known as glass eels, which are 5–10 centimetres long. They are then placed in tanks, where they grow large until they are ready for slaughter, smoking, and packaging labelled “farmed.” A couple of years ago, I contacted the Consumer Complaints Board to ask whether it could really be permissible to sell wild-caught eels under the description “farmed eel.” Isn’t that misleading marketing? Because the matter concerned a food product, the board referred the case to the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration, which took it upon itself to investigate. It turns out that marketing wild-caught eels as “farmed” is permitted under an EU regulation—the “Regulation on the common organisation of the markets in fishery and aquaculture products No. 104/2000,” Article 38(3)—which states that if the animal has gained at least half its weight or lived at least half its life in captivity, the resulting product may be described as “farmed.” The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration therefore considers this not to be misleading. That is somewhat absurd, given that the same EU has banned the use of the word “milk” for products other than those containing mammalian udder secretions, allegedly out of concern that people might not know what oat milk (or a dandelion?) contains. My contention would be that it is far more difficult for consumers to determine where their fishery products come from when wild-caught fish may be called farmed fish than it is to understand what plant-based mince is made of. In any case, eels face many pressures. In particular, the blocking of waterways by dams is a problem for them. Ending commercial fishing alone would therefore not solve the eels’ problems, but perhaps, on the occasion of the celebration of love, we could nevertheless apply the precautionary principle and avoid eel altogether at the Christmas lunch table, regardless of how long—or how briefly—it was allowed to live in the wild before ending up in the smokehouse. Enjoy your meal!