Typical. You wait months for a sustainable fish initiative and then a whole bunch come along at once.

Okay, it’s been a while since Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall won his war on discards. But now a couple of major retailers have launched new pushes of their own, within a week of each other, with a view to keeping our seas in business – and, presumably, reeling in a few extra eco-conscious punters at the same time.

The Marks & Spencer scheme – named Forever Fish, evoking vague memories of seventies kids show Tomorrow People – began in stores today. Perhaps optimistically, the scheme is intended to finance itself, via the sale of special carrier bags at 5p a pop.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s last week unveiled its own solution to dwindling cod reserves: dishing out free portions of lesser-favoured species, such as coley, pouting and hake (which sounds like a seventies prog-rock trio). Even further upmarket, Selfridges last month vowed to end all sales of fish from unsustainable sources.

The M&S effort is part of its far broader Plan A push. As we reported last week, that ambitious drive has run into difficulties over organic produce. Organic sales at M&S in the past year were lower than in 2005, when M&S took its Plan A benchmarks.

The ongoing crisis in the sector was further underlined by a survey of mums we received yesterday from brand strategists Syren. Organic was a strong purchase driver for just 11% of those polled, while for a majority it wasn’t a factor at all. Counter-intuitively, those most interested in organic were the people least interested in health considerations. For them, the organic issue is an ethical, aspirational choice.

While organic has struggled from its inability to communicate a clear and tangible benefit to consumers, the image of empty seas is surely stark enough to gain traction with shoppers, so maybe efforts to woo us off the most popular fish can succeed.

Of course, the new owners of Quorn could point out that anyone really interested in saving our seas should go the whole hog and switch to its new line of fish-free fish fingers.

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