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This morning on BBC Radio 4, presenter Dan Saladino followed up on a November 2025 instalment of The Food Programme, in which he considered the ethics of eel eating and debated the issue of including European eel on restaurant menus. Joined by BBC Eye’s Rob Wilson, who released his own podcast, ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, earlier this week, Dan sought to expand the scope of the narrative beyond food, beyond eel eating, and beyond the European context, also considering reports of illegal or unusual eel trading activity in Haiti, Poland, and the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia. The podcast is to a great extent a continuation of ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, and the reuse of excerpts from Wednesday’s broadcast can give the impression of a review show, more so than a new documentary. But Dan offers fresh insights, stemming from his professional interest in food, and in producing the show in an interview format, he succeeds in making the content more accessible and connecting with a more general audience.

In the final third of the programme, when Rob leaves and new voices enter the conversation, he turns the focus back to the United Kingdom, and ongoing debates in local environmental politics. He quotes from a letter from the Environment Agency, sent to more than one hundred elvermen on the rivers Severn and Parrett, and he explains that it is irresponsible to take glass eels from a river without an export trade permit being issued, or restocking plans approved. In a recent incident, the letter claims that ‘large numbers of elvers were taken these rivers’, and that ‘a significant proportion of this catch subsequently perished whilst being held at aquaculture production businesses’. This, the author says, cannot be allowed to happen again, and will be stopped. But this understandable remedial action is also understood to have knock on effects on fishers with the right accreditation, as well as conservationists, in Britain and overseas. Claiming that ‘the latest scientific advice on managing eel stocks is that there should be no fishing, not even for glass eels for restocking’, the Environment Agency now argues that it ‘cannot support speculative exploitation of eels without a clear justified purpose’, and for the first time, the application process for predetermined elver fishing certification has been withdrawn.

After speaking to elvermen in Gloucestershire about the fishing ban, Dan turns to representatives from the Sustainable Eel Group and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea to gain a more comprehensive picture of the eel fishing issue. Caroline Durif, who works on eel, wrasse, and lumpfish at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research, is introduced in her capacity as chair of the ICES Working Group on Eel, which opposes all eel fishing. Her perspective is consistent with ICES’ advice, and in arguing that ‘all anthropogenic mortalities should be as close to zero as possible’, she effectively makes the case for removing all human interventions in freshwater, which include engineering works, drainage schemes, and chemical pollutants, but her emphasis is on fishing. Since these are too complicated and time-consuming to reverse, she says, ‘this is why there should be zero catches in all habitat’, and that her advice ‘applies to all recreational and commercial catches, and including catches of glass eels for possible restocking of aquaculture’. SEG’s own Willem Dekker sees things differently: ‘eel habitats and humans are so closely interwoven there will always be humans in contact with eels’,  he says, ‘so to say no eel can be taken at all, it must be zero, is not realistic, and what we need to know is what is the minimal level we must protect’. The crux of this argument is that without assigning the European eel a clear quantifiable value – without establishing a link between healthy eel stocks and specific economic stakeholders, whose interests can be considered as part of a policymaker or developer’s cost-benefit analysis – there is only very limited scope for environmental conservation. ‘If we don’t have an eel fishery’, Dekker says ‘people will just pollute’ or block the eel’s environment, and say ‘who cares?’

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The podcast is available on BBC Sounds.