NZFSSRC
Is wild food safe to eat? This article has been written exclusively for Food New Zealand by the New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre.
Wendy Newport-Smith, Manager of the NZFSSRC
Pani Hook (left) and Trevor Waikawa are two Whakakī Lake “locals” who will be involved in some of the hands-on water monitoring
Whakakī Lake Trustee chair, Richard Brooking
Who am I?
Eels as food
This is not science fiction. We have in our midst a dark and mysterious creature that travels a vast distance across the Pacific, with a faultless sense of direction, to some remembered place in Aotearoa. It glides, mostly unseen, beneath fern-cast shadows, can live for over 100 years and grow up to 25 kg, and is able to survive long enough out of water to take shortcuts across land. When some inner prompt calls ‘time’, it changes appearance and swims all the way back to its secret subtropical spawning ground to breed and die. Even now, no one knows exactly where that place is or for how many millions of years these epic journeys have been part of this awe-inspiring lifecycle.
Attitudes to many things, including the value of eels, have changed over the last century. Their commercial potential was exploited fairly recently, and this put a stop to their extermination. Smoked eel has become a gourmet delicacy at a gourmet price. A family of entrepreneurial Dutch immigrants, the Tecklenburgs, set up a company in Te Kauwhata in 1964 – NZ Eel Processing Company Ltd - to process and market eels, which were a traditional food in Holland. And now there are niche companies like Apatu Aqua in Northland, smoking eels to order for restaurants.
For a long time these special creatures were disregarded, undervalued and even, in the 1930s, classified as vermin and exterminated in huge numbers to stop them competing with the newly introduced trout. But tuna/eels have always been a taonga/treasure for Māori - once a main source of protein and no doubt essential to sustain inland expeditions. Māori smoked eels too, which meant they could be safely consumed for a long time after being caught. 18
Food New Zealand
The Ministry for Primary Industries manages the population closely under the quota management system. The quota is currently 400 tonnes per year (for long- and short-finned eels combined), most of which is exported to China, the UK, Europe, and Australia, either live or smoked. They must be larger than 250 g and under 4.0 kg. Harvesting company, Southfish Ltd, says the feedback from the individuals around the country who catch the eels, is that the stock is healthy and plentiful. But eels have a major problem – dams and other barriers which stop
