Cod, A Success Story?
Not all modern fish tales end in disaster
A few years back, while walking around a village in northwestern Norway I was surprised by the appearance of a codfish split down the center and held up to dry in the spring sun. It was a massive fish, by American standards anyway, probably over thirty pounds. Its appearance surprised me because it ran contrary to the way codfish have been going on our side of the Atlantic for the last half century.
Ever since the author Mark Kurlansky published his 1997 international bestseller Cod, it has been an article of faith in the media that cod are doomed. Kurlansky’s pronouncement that North Atlantic fishermen had found themselves at the “wrong end of a 1000 year fishing spree” when the famous Newfoundland cod grounds were closed to fishing in the late 1980s set a tone for a one-way narrative of diminishment. This narrative begins when the Basque first discovered codfish grounds off Canada around 800 AD. They figured out how to salt them for preservation and then introduced this first industrialized fish product to the rest of Europe. The “fish on Friday” habit of European Catholics was launched by the availability of cheap, salted cod and expressed itself in different national recipes from Portugal to Russia. In the Kurlansky-ian mode, this was the warning bell that spelled the disaster for cod. Industrialization led…
