This is not a joke, so please read this simple recipe carefully. More importantly, reflect on the implications of this recipe for Faux Tuna, a concoction of ingredients masquerading as real tuna.

“First peel, clean and slice a watermelon (yes, a watermelon) into 30cm ‘planks’, season with salt, pepper and dried ground seaweed and leave to rest covered by a towel overnight. Next morning roll watermelon in sesame seeds and ground chilli pepper and place in freezer for 10 minutes. Remove from freezer, slice thinly, season with sesame oil, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar and serve with pickled ginger and wasabi.”

Why would ingenious Chicago chef Homaro Cantu venture to these extremes of creativity to produce a dish that is supposed to resemble tuna? Why are celebrity chefs all over the world promoting sustainable seafood in their restaurants and TV programmes? The answer is simple – people doubt whether it is right to eat tuna. People are becoming aware that tuna is an endangered species and that if we carry on fishing and eating it at the rate we are, it will change from being an endangered species to a collapsed fishery and nobody will ever eat tuna again. Our smart Chicago chef is cashing in on the current trend which is all about sustainable fishing and eating. He is not alone. All over the world people are realising that there is simply not enough fish in the sea to feed all the mouths that want to eat it.

By now everybody knows that bluefin tuna is not the only endangered species, of course. We catch three times the sustainable amount of swordfish and twice that of red shrimp and hake. We have just about eradicated red mullet and we know nothing about lampuki because nobody has bothered to find out. The Mediterranean is dying because we are not managing our resources.

The North Atlantic once teemed with cod, nations even went to war over it a few years ago. So much cod was caught that now there is no more cod to be caught and 40,000 jobs were lost in Canada.

Similarly, the Pacific Ocean is at this very moment losing the jack mackerel whose stocks have declined from 30 million tons to three million in 10 years. Jack mackerel, rich in Omega 3, is used to feed ‘farmed’ tuna and salmon − five kilos of mackerel are needed to raise a single kilo of salmon. It is also a staple food in Africa.

Reports say that by 2050 the ocean’s major commercial fish species will have been wiped out by overfishing. The industry will run out of jack mackerel to fish and just move on to over exploit the next species so that in the end all the larger species will have been eradicated. At that stage, the oceans’ ecological balance will have been upset and it’s anybody’s guess what will happen next. Many say we will be eating only jellyfish, small fish and farmed mussels and clams because there will be nothing else in the sea.

After the Mediterranean, the South Pacific is the new fishing playground. Chinese, Russian and EU flagged factory ships haul in millions of tons of mackerel a year and the annual catch is decreasing alarmingly, indicating an incipient collapse of the fishery. Economic and social reasons effectively block all efforts to control the trend and the united political will to take effective long term measures just does not exist because ‘long term’ does not make political sense.

The fish are not the only ones to suffer; the traditional fisherman is also going through hard times. The EU has imposed fishing quotas across the board to try to curb the incipient demise of the tuna. These quotas are aimed at the commercial fish industry that lands hundreds of tons of tuna in gigantic purse seine nets in one afternoon. The small traditional fisherman would consider himself extremely lucky if he landed a few hundred kilos in a whole year – a mere drop in the ocean. It’s a matter of scale, but unfortunately quotas have been applied to all fishing enterprises irrespective of size. The injustice of it is that the small fisherman is under very strict scrutiny by the authorities while the international scale of the commercial operations makes it much more difficult to control effectively. The result is that the traditional family-owned luzzu fishing boat cannot make ends meet with increasing costs and decreasing income.

It is evident that fishing enterprises below a certain size should not be constrained by such draconian measures – fishing quotas for small vessels should be abolished outright. Furthermore, aid must be extended to these families for upgrading their equipment to fish for other species, for educational and training programmes and possibly also to diversify into other markets such as tourism.

fish4tomorrow is a campaign by five environmental NGOs – Nature Trust, Din l-Art Helwa, Greenhouse, Get Up Stand Up and Sharklab. It is working to highlight the numerous lesser-known or under appreciated seafood species that happen to be not only delicious but also − and more importantly − plentiful compared to their more “noble”‘ cousins.

Oh, and don’t forget to try the Faux Tuna recipe.

‘Faux Tuna’ recipe by Homaro Cantu of Moto Restaurant, Chicago