Cod: A Biography of the Fish That
Changed the World
1997. Mark Kurlansky. Walker and Company,
New York. 294 pp. hardbound, $21.
Reading
this utterly beguiling book--with its fascinating mix of biology,
history, fishing technology, and culinary lore (complete with
recipes)--I had the feeling that I must have missed more than
a few days of school in my youth. Lots more. How was it that
I didn't know anything about "the fish that changed the
world"? Here are just a few of the things I didn't know
until I read Cod.
As early as the 14th century, Basque fishermen were catching the cod that abounded in the cold waters off the coast of what is now New England and Canada's Maritime Provinces. Being secretive, hard-nosed businessmen, they just never told anyone about the New World they'd found, leaving that to the vainglorious explorers who came later.
The long sea voyages of the Age of Exploration were made possible in part by stockfish--salted, dried cod. With the look and texture of soft wood, stockfish doesn't spoil, and is about 80 percent protein. Stockfish can be soaked in water to soften it and then cooked; or you can just gnaw off slivers and eat. Until recently, a piece of stockfish was the daily lunch fare of school children in Iceland.
When the Pilgrims set sail for America they headed for a place earlier dubbed Cape Cod for the abundance of this fish off its shores. They intended to be fishermen, although none knew the first thing about fishing. Still, within a few years, New England's first fortunes were being made in the lucrative cod trade.
One of the thorniest issues in the negotiations between the fledgling United States and Great Britain to end the Revolutionary War was fishing rights, in particular access to the rich Grand Banks fishery.
That's just the ancient history. Frozen fish sticks were invented in the 1920s to help Massachusetts fishermen find bigger markets for their growing cod catches. Britain and Iceland fought three "cod wars" between 1958 and 1975, during which few shots were fired but British fishing trawlers were harassed, rammed, and had their nets cut by the Icelandic Coast Guard. And as recently as the early 1980s, shooting broke out between New England and Canadian fishermen over access to cod on Georges Bank.
Unlike the central character in a typical biography, the cod is a passive player, a hapless combination of features that made it important to people: It's abundant. It's easy to catch. It's good to eat. So Cod is actually less the biography of a fish than it is the history of a relationship between people and a natural resource. But this almost 1,000-year-old relationship resembles a life. It was born, midwifed by medieval fishermen. It led a tumultuous adult career. And, now, it is senescent.
The relationship between people and cod is dying because people asked too much of this fish. For at least a century, some people have been worried about the depletion of cod stocks in the North Atlantic. But these voices of concern were largely drowned out in the clamor of those who proclaimed that nature's bounty was inexhaustible. Even while cod stocks were, in fact, declining, the decline was masked by advanced fishing technology that resulted in ever-larger harvests. Then at the end of the 1980s, the impossible happened: Newfoundland and New England cod were gone as commercial species. There simply weren't enough of them to make fishing worthwhile. Without careful management, it's just a matter of time before the same is true of cod throughout its range.
Everyone should read this slender book, with its eclectic, colorful, but ultimately sad story of the loss of a natural resource, and of a relationship with the natural world. As the author asks, "Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?" It seems it is.
--Susan Lumpkin
(ZooGoer 27(1) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
