Eat Your Neighbour’s Fish!
Marjan Ippel doesn’t do meal boxes. At the end of the week, half of them are always still unopened due to unforeseen eating circumstances. She makes an exception for one subscription service: ‘Buurvissen’. Now, once a week, she eats fresh seasonal fish caught by small Urker fishing boats along the Dutch coast.
“You can walk from Amsterdam to the North Sea, so fresh fish from our own North Sea is obviously a piece of cake. Not at all,” says Jur Jacobs of Buurvissen. “Instead, our North Sea fish goes abroad, while panga from Vietnam is number one here. Pretty strange. And a shame, because you don’t know what you’re missing with freshly caught North Sea fish.”
Urker fishing boats
The ‘Buurvissen’ initiative therefore lets you discover, via a subscription every Monday, plaice, cod, skate, gurnard or ling caught the day before by small Urker fishing boats off the North Sea coast. Which one it will be exactly depends on the season and the weather. But guaranteed to have been caught yesterday and on your plate today.
And that is sustainable. But sustainability criteria are rather flexible, Buurvissen knows too. Their criterion is whether fish stocks are healthy, as with sole, for which catch quotas have been increased this year. And whether the fishermen fish sustainably. That means using small boats with low engine power and therefore limited fuel consumption, as well as light fishing gear.
Our North Sea fish goes abroad, while Vietnamese panga is number one here.
The seasonal fish are selected and filleted for Buurvissen by Urker Jan Woort. The latter is done to keep the barrier low. Jur Jacobs: “We bring the fish’s origin to the people, while making it as easy as possible for them.”
Neighbourly contact
And since Jan is already driving to Amsterdam with fish for half of the capital’s culinary scene, he takes the fillets for Buurvissen along on Mondays. 300 grams, enough for two people. Not vacuum-packed, not frozen, and packaged without gas. That way, none of the flavour is lost.
The idea is that you order together with your neighbours. Hence the name ‘Buurvissen’. One neighbour becomes the delivery address where the other neighbours can collect their fish. From four orders onwards, delivery can already be made to a specific—at present, Amsterdam-only—address. Jur: “It’s much more sociable that way: connecting with your neighbours through fish.”
