Whether to shell out and eat hand-dived scallops, or go for a supermarket pack of the cheaper dredged ones? Just one question in the ethical minefield of what fish to eat.

But what if the answer actually lies in a wider economic assessment?

“Hand-dived”. The phrase seems synonymous with high-end restaurants, menus with sources for every ingredient, big dining bills, like Tom Kitchin’s a la carte £130 winter menu offering a starter of “hand-dived Orkney scallops baked in the shell, seasonal vegetables, white wine Vermouth and herb sauce”, linked with fishing for the few, not the many.

No matter where you look, they don't come cheap. I may be able to order online, four to six hand-dived scallops from Welch’s fishmongers in Edinburgh for £7.95, but that’s still a few pounds more than the supermarket dredged pack for a fiver.

Or how about creel-caught langoustines? They’re also not inexpensive at £20 for a platter of these “creel caught” nephrops (scampi and langoustines) from Skye, served with harissa butter, at my local Dulse restaurant. Meanwhile, in Tesco, you can get a pack of bottom-trawled scampi (just the tails of those langoustines, breaded) for £4.50.

But that price differential is there for a reason – it represents human effort, and, to some degree, risk. For those scallops, a diver had donned oxygen tank and taken risks to reach down onto the seabed and collect by hand.

For some time, creelers and divers, alongside environmentalists, have been arguing for greater restrictions on dredging and bottom-trawling, even a three-mile inshore........

© Herald Scotland