The restaurant belongs to a family that also owns a fish stall in the bazaar area, so they really know their fish. This month they have a special deal, a lunch deal: until 5 p.m. each day you get grilled turbot (kalkan), a wonderful salad and a soft drink for TL 15.As a bonus, a pet shop across the street held my daughter's attention for the entire time. As Turks love children, it was no problem for the waiters and cashier to take turns escorting her over to see the chicks, ducklings, birds and turtles. I'm not sure what she learned from seeing ducklings crowded so tightly into an aquarium that they were pecking each others' heads raw -- maybe how to protect her personal space in İstanbul.
Our waiter told us that last year fishermen caught very few turbot, but that this year's catch is great, thus the cheap price for lunch. The turbot season stretches from April to June. We city dwellers tend to think of the annual runs of various fish species as products of natural forces and translate plenty and scarcity into market prices… Wow, anchovies are practically free this year… Ooh, mackerel is so expensive, what a rip-off.
Turbot is the queen of local fish, commanding the highest price of any, sometimes as much as TL 70 a kilo. Most of the turbot in İstanbul's fish markets comes from the Black Sea, with the main fishing fleets based in the western part of the sea, on both sides of the entrance to the Bosporus.
So, how many fish are in the sea? No one knows, but only a landlubber like me would think of counting individual fish. The professionals think in tons. Counting turbot in the Black Sea is made especially difficult by the sea being shared by many different countries, so-called littoral states, including Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia.
The European Commission last fall adopted a proposal for “fishing opportunities” for the Black Sea for 2009. The commission proposed a “Total Allowable Catch” of 100 tons for turbot, unchanged from 2008, based on advice from Bulgarian and Romanian fisheries scientists, and from the commission's own Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee on Fisheries (STECF). Note that Bulgaria and Romania are both now EU members, but that since they represent only a small percentage of the Black Sea coastline, the commission does not influence much of the sea's fisheries.
Due to the lack of adequate data, the STECF was unable to provide new advice on appropriate catch levels for 2009. Therefore its advice of October 2007 remained valid in a precautionary perspective, “that turbot catches should be as close to zero as possible, and in any case not exceed 100 tons, until a sign of recovery of the stock is observed.”
The commission now proposes adjusting fishing limits to bring them closer to recent real catch levels, but without changing them by more than 15 percent year-on-year. Should I, as a good prospective citizen of the EU, tell the commissioners of my lunch in Kadiköy? Does such anecdotal evidence have any scientific merit?
It may be a coincidence, but I recently had lunch in the executive dining room on the 27th floor of an İstanbul skyscraper. My host kindly gave me the seat with a view, a view of the Black Sea, and the waiter brought … yes, turbot. Do money and power and visual contact with the sea add any value to my insights?
The commission also proposed technical measures for the turbot fishery. The minimum mesh sizes are now set at 360 millimeters and 400 millimeters, with the 360 millimeters size a temporary derogation to allow the Bulgarian fleet time to adjust. The experts proposed no change in either the two-month closed fishing season or the 45 centimeters minimum landing size for turbot.
Unfortunately, even the larger mesh size does not allow dolphins to escape, some two to three thousand of which, mainly harbor porpoises, die every year in gill nets and trawling nets of the turbot fishery in the Black Sea.
Marine biologists at İstanbul University have studied the Turkish Black Sea fishery in an effort to understand and protect the dolphins. But that's another story. Meanwhile, eat all you can, in good conscience.
