Chowder head

Somewhere I heard about this book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and thought it might be a good recommendation for the Drinking & Reading Society, it being about the natural world and man’s relationship to it and all. Fortunately, I listened to it on tape first. There are way too many recipes and pointless meandering interviews with former Labradorean fishermen and not enough science or even history.

The only real lesson is to remember that people not so long ago thought cod were inexhaustible – like the buffalo, the northern forests, and hundreds of other inexhaustible resources that now stand exhausted. I suppose it’s useful to have one more example, but haven’t we learned this lesson yet? I suppose not; while changing tapes I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh’s daily rant to the effect that “People, there is no such thing as global warming. Humans aren’t doing anything to harm the planet.” Maybe he should read Cod.

But, so you don’t have to, I have included this 5-star review off the Amazon website from Cloudia in Seattle:

There's a cartoon in Matt Groening, the nine types of professors. One is the single-minded type, as in "The country that controls magnesium controls the world!" His main drawback is that he could be right. Cod sort of reminds me of that.

You may not have known how important or popular this particular fish was to most of our ancestors in Western civilization, but, according Kurlansky, Cod was practically like bread. It was easy to fish, there was a ton of it, and once Europeans learned the various ways of drying it (with cold and/or salt) all people could think about was trading this staple. Yes, Kurlansky's book is single-minded, and at times you might forget this is a fish tale. When the Vikings found America, what where they looking for? And how did they manage to sustain themselves through the long ocean voyage? The answers are of course, cod. Kurlansky also has a few outlandish things to say about another favorite topic of his, the Basque, who it appears had been regularly fishing for Cod in Newfoundland long before Columbus found America. They were really good at keeping a secret, you see.

Fortunately, there's a serious, or, at least more socially acceptable side, to Kurlansky's fish story. The fishing trade really is threatened. You can no longer practically walk on Atlantic cod. Even Icelanders who found their entire economy changing from one of sustenance to a first world service economy, during the two world wars, have a difficult time protecting their dwindling stock. If Aldous Huxley's grandfather, Thomas, asserted in the 19th century that cod would never become extinct, it was only because he could not imagine the rapid technological changes which would turn fishing into harvesting, and the classic practice of drying fish into freezing it, on board the fishing boats themselves. Good-bye bacalao, hello fishsticks.

It's a sad tale as ways of life dwindle and change, and even the very essentials of human existence that have lasted for thousands of years go unheard of by the post-industrial society. But are we really evolving into something better? Kurlansky peppers his narrative with quotes from notables throughout the ages and interesting, if often archaic, recipes.

OK, so now you don’t have to read the book unless you really, really want to.