Wild salmon was on sale last week at the Harrods luxury store in London for £245 a kilo, making the cost of the average salmon to be over £700, or around £60 for a single portion. Chips would probably be extra.
The fish was claimed by Harrods to have legally come from the river Tweed, and a spokesman for the Northumberland Inshore fisheries authority has confirmed to me that there is still a very small fishery operating legally from there using a traditional hand netting system where only a small handful of fish are being caught.
The sale of the fish from the Tweed is the result of a complex arrangement with the Scottish government as it may have been born in Scotland and crossed the border.
The sale of the wild, as opposed to farmed, fish comes at a time when the crisis in the amount of fish returning to spawn in British rivers is reaching a crisis point, with almost all the commercially driven Scottish salmon netting stations having their licenses withdrawn and almost all salmon caught by rod and line having to be legally returned to the river live.