My book explores how we eat the ocean, in many ways, every day, sometimes
without knowing it. Of course we know when we consciously eat fish – battered,
breaded, grilled, steamed, or raw - and when we tongue delicious health-sustaining
oysters, or partake of steaming bowls of relatively sustainable mussels. What we
may not be aware of is that 25% of the global ocean catch disappears into fish
oil and fishmeal. In this form fish turn up in supermarket white bread
fortified with omega 3, cosmetic products, pet food, and become food for
farmed fish.
Humans have eaten the ocean for as long as
we’ve been around. But we didn’t have the technology that now allows fishing
boats to go further out, and to fish ever deeper down. Until relatively
recently we thought that we could eat the ocean with impunity. Now we are at
risk of eating it up, devouring it until there’s nothing left except the
not-so-apocryphal jellyfish n’ chips.
While concern about the terrestrial
production of protein has burgeoned over the last decades, it seems harder to
get people to care about where their fish comes from. Perhaps it is because it
is difficult to cuddle a cod. Though as readers will discover, there is a wacky
FishLove conservationist site, which includes photographs of a naked
Lizzy Jagger riding bareback on a yellowfin tuna. WWF’s campaigns resort to photoshopped images of bluefin tuna with panda or white rhino masks to trick us into
caring. Fish just don’t have the anthropomorphic associations that seemingly
make us care about whether our chickens are happy free-rangers or not. I think
that it is also because fish inhabit a milieu that most humans find cold and
wet and bewildering. What are these cold-blooded creatures for if not for human
eating?
Across the book I try to engage readers in
ways that will make them interested in the wondrous complexities of marine
life, of the sea and her inhabitants. In my ethnographic travels to the north
of Scotland, to the far south of Australia, and to points in between, I gather material
about how people relate to fish, and how they tell their stories – and often
deep care and love – for them. Fishers, marine scientists, fisheries managers,
and people who live by and on the sea have related their concerns, which I then
relate to some wider questions: how can we help fishing communities, fish, and
the oceans be more sustainable? What are the gender relations in the fishing
field? What are queer fish? I am deeply invested in teasing out the very
different sorts of knowledge that construct what eating the ocean means. Who
tells the stories, how, to whom and why is a theme that reverberates through my
book.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
My book explores how we eat the ocean, in many ways, every day, sometimes without knowing it. Of course we know when we consciously eat fish – battered, breaded, grilled, steamed, or raw - and when we tongue delicious health-sustaining oysters, or partake of steaming bowls of relatively sustainable mussels. What we may not be aware of is that 25% of the global ocean catch disappears into fish oil and fishmeal. In this form fish turn up in supermarket white bread fortified with omega 3, cosmetic products, pet food, and become food for farmed fish.
Humans have eaten the ocean for as long as we’ve been around. But we didn’t have the technology that now allows fishing boats to go further out, and to fish ever deeper down. Until relatively recently we thought that we could eat the ocean with impunity. Now we are at risk of eating it up, devouring it until there’s nothing left except the not-so-apocryphal jellyfish n’ chips.
While concern about the terrestrial production of protein has burgeoned over the last decades, it seems harder to get people to care about where their fish comes from. Perhaps it is because it is difficult to cuddle a cod. Though as readers will discover, there is a wacky FishLove conservationist site, which includes photographs of a naked Lizzy Jagger riding bareback on a yellowfin tuna. WWF’s campaigns resort to photoshopped images of bluefin tuna with panda or white rhino masks to trick us into caring. Fish just don’t have the anthropomorphic associations that seemingly make us care about whether our chickens are happy free-rangers or not. I think that it is also because fish inhabit a milieu that most humans find cold and wet and bewildering. What are these cold-blooded creatures for if not for human eating?
Across the book I try to engage readers in ways that will make them interested in the wondrous complexities of marine life, of the sea and her inhabitants. In my ethnographic travels to the north of Scotland, to the far south of Australia, and to points in between, I gather material about how people relate to fish, and how they tell their stories – and often deep care and love – for them. Fishers, marine scientists, fisheries managers, and people who live by and on the sea have related their concerns, which I then relate to some wider questions: how can we help fishing communities, fish, and the oceans be more sustainable? What are the gender relations in the fishing field? What are queer fish? I am deeply invested in teasing out the very different sorts of knowledge that construct what eating the ocean means. Who tells the stories, how, to whom and why is a theme that reverberates through my book.