Monday, January 24, 2005
A Fish Story
Comments on "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World," by Mark Kurlansky
You pick up a book about cod (you know, the fish). There's a picture of a couple of big ugly fish on the cover. It makes some gigantic claim about the universal importance of something you have rarely if ever thought about. A good quarter of the book is made up of old-fashioned recipes for cod, for goodness sakes ("Wash it very clean, and Score it with a Knife, strew a little Salt on it, and lay it in a Stew-pan before the Fire, with something behind it, that the Fire may Roast it."). How can this be a good book?
Let me tell you, it's fascinating. It called to my attention all the other times when studying history when fish (which, at least when we're talking fish in the Atlantic, almost always means cod) are a barely-mentioned or unspoken subtext to history. For example, why did the Vikings go to the New World, and what did they eat on the way there, centuries before even the most primitive refrigeration? Cod. Why did John Adams almost derail the treaty negotiations at the end of the Revolutionary War? Cod. What would cause England, terror of the seas, to send warships out to take on poor little old Iceland? Cod. What issue prompted the only shots to be fired between Americans and Canadians since the French and Indian War? Cod. What are fishsticks made of? Hake. (Ha ha--got you on that one. They used to be made out of cod, but there's been too much overfishing in recent years.)
Throughout these historical morsels is woven a theme about conservation that I can't quite pin down. Kurlansky certainly laments the recent decline of the cod population, but wishes we could go back to the days of killing and eating them with abandon. His final paragraph:
You pick up a book about cod (you know, the fish). There's a picture of a couple of big ugly fish on the cover. It makes some gigantic claim about the universal importance of something you have rarely if ever thought about. A good quarter of the book is made up of old-fashioned recipes for cod, for goodness sakes ("Wash it very clean, and Score it with a Knife, strew a little Salt on it, and lay it in a Stew-pan before the Fire, with something behind it, that the Fire may Roast it."). How can this be a good book?
Let me tell you, it's fascinating. It called to my attention all the other times when studying history when fish (which, at least when we're talking fish in the Atlantic, almost always means cod) are a barely-mentioned or unspoken subtext to history. For example, why did the Vikings go to the New World, and what did they eat on the way there, centuries before even the most primitive refrigeration? Cod. Why did John Adams almost derail the treaty negotiations at the end of the Revolutionary War? Cod. What would cause England, terror of the seas, to send warships out to take on poor little old Iceland? Cod. What issue prompted the only shots to be fired between Americans and Canadians since the French and Indian War? Cod. What are fishsticks made of? Hake. (Ha ha--got you on that one. They used to be made out of cod, but there's been too much overfishing in recent years.)
Throughout these historical morsels is woven a theme about conservation that I can't quite pin down. Kurlansky certainly laments the recent decline of the cod population, but wishes we could go back to the days of killing and eating them with abandon. His final paragraph:
There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks? Whales are mammals, and mammals do not lay a million eggs. We were forced to give up commercial hunting and to raise domestic mammals for meat, preserving the wild ones as best we could. It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.
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