Fish & Fishing | Walter Speirs
Sometimes there’s a special connection between the food and the place it’s found or grown. It certainly seems to be the case in favoured spots on the western seaboard. By Connel on Loch Etive, for instance, the tides bring in the plankton-rich waters of the Atlantic and nourish the hanging ropes of mussels growing steadily under the watchful eye of Walter Speirs and his team at Muckairn Mussels.
It’s an early start, if you are a mussel farmer – say, 6am for despatch of already prepared and graded mussels. Then there’s the harvesting – lifting the strings by crane out of the water. Next comes washing and grading on shore. It is a routine that Walter knew very well, though now his interests go far beyond the shores of Loch Etive. He’s also Chairman of the Scottish Shellfish Marketing Group and a Director of the Mussel Inn, actually two seafood restaurants which have set high standards in the Edinburgh and Glasgow dining scenes. So, from time to time, he has to leave the peerless hill and loch landscapes of the west for business at, say, Bellshill in Lanarkshire, where the Group has a shellfish processing plant.
There’s a buoyant air around in the shellfish-producing industry at the moment, with expanding markets not just with seafood restaurants but with specialist food shops and supermarkets as well. Walter likes to think it’s because of the growing realisation amongst consumers that mussels and the way they are farmed represent the healthiest of foods grown in the most sustainable of ways. For a start, they are organic by definition, spending the two or three years it takes from ‘spat’ (tiny mussel-fry) to full-size mussels, filtering plankton from the waters, without any other artificial feeding. (Incidentally, as they grow on ropes they ever touch the seabed and hence are also grit free.)
Not only are mussels a natural sustainable crop that don’t deplete resources in the environment, they also contain a range of trace elements and minerals, such as selenium which make them, nutritionally speaking, an ideal food. That they also taste brilliant is another bonus.
His range of activities means Walter Speirs can follow his shellfish all the way through from the loch to the table in a kind of traceability that has its parallels on land where, for example, some farm businesses are following through their own produce all the way to the shop counter. Walter believes that it is this element of trust in the product which is becoming increasingly important for discriminating consumers. They want to be sure of quality. And if it’s possible to taste a landscape, then the sweet, salt flavour of a natural mussel is the sea-washed beauty of the West Highlands in a shell. Who said food production couldn’t be romantic?