January 4, 2021 — People enjoy scallops in Oban. “We can’t get enough of them to satisfy demand,” smiles Carol Watt, whose family business has been selling fish for more than a century in the port city of Argyll.
Watt explains how she likes to cook the mollusks: pan-fried and eaten with pancetta, Italian bacon, as a line of masked shoppers forms outside her tiny mustard-yellow shack.
Watt beams with excitement as she shows off a tray of shucked scallops, palm-sized, pale, fleshy slices with the fiery red roe still holding on, which some customers find too spicy, wearing an apron emblazoned with a species-rich school of fish.
In the past, scallops, often referred to simply as “clams” in Scotland, were never so common. In 1960, the Scottish ports landed just sixty tons of the species. There were 15,000 tons in 2019, down 2% from 2018 but still worth almost £ 36 million.
The boom, however, has sparked an often bitter conflict about how scallops, which grow on the seabed, are harvested between environmentalists and the fishing industry.
Some “scallops” are lifted from the sea sustainably by divers, who charge a premium for doing so.