This book is a passionate, sometimes
critical and frustrated intervention into the current dominant politics of
food. Public campaigns, and journalistic writing often dumb down complex
questions into banal slogans: eat local, eat seasonally, etc. In terms of the
global-local configurations of fishing, it is hard to “eat local” fish. If you
want a slogan for fish it would have to be eat small.
Within marine the “simplification of the
sea” refers fishing down the web – how we are eliminating the top predators,
and then ever downwards. This allows for exploding populations of crustaceans
and other invertebrates, which is good for lobstermen. But in the (not so) long
run, this destroys ecosystems and threatens trophic collapse whereby we are
back to the jellyfish scenario with seas filled with medusoza, and
gelatinous zooplankton that nothing wants to eat. I hijack this scientific term
and use it to talk about how in public debate the sea is being simplified.
Numerous well-meaning NGO campaigns resort to simplistic devices such as the
traffic light system, whereby red is bad. Even these have been further dumbed
down now to only “green” ticks.
As a longtime feminist, and writer, my turn
to fish has disconcerted many. It does, however, follow from my many studies of
various aspects of eating. I also challenge how in current discussions about the
Anthropocene, “age of the human,” gender seems to be passé. From a discussion
of mermaids through to the lives of fisherwomen, I seek to elevate gendered and
queer matters of human-fish entanglement. At a conceptual level I grapple with
how gender and sexuality, as well as ethnicity and class, have been squeezed
out of academic discussions about the Anthropocene, climate change and the
more-than-human. I seek to recover the lost stories of the women who have
followed fish, and to hear what happens to human-fish settlements when the fish
disappear.
Two instances of this ground the chapter in
history – the rise and fall of the herring industry in Scotland that lasted
from the nineteenth century until post WW II, and the collapse of the cod fisheries
of the Great Banks off Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. The women who form
the overwhelming workforce in fish processing, as well as the fishwives who
kept the books of family fish businesses could see that a crisis was looming.
In the male-dominated world of scientists and fisheries managers, their voices
weren’t counted; they didn’t matter.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
This book is a passionate, sometimes critical and frustrated intervention into the current dominant politics of food. Public campaigns, and journalistic writing often dumb down complex questions into banal slogans: eat local, eat seasonally, etc. In terms of the global-local configurations of fishing, it is hard to “eat local” fish. If you want a slogan for fish it would have to be eat small.
Within marine the “simplification of the sea” refers fishing down the web – how we are eliminating the top predators, and then ever downwards. This allows for exploding populations of crustaceans and other invertebrates, which is good for lobstermen. But in the (not so) long run, this destroys ecosystems and threatens trophic collapse whereby we are back to the jellyfish scenario with seas filled with medusoza, and gelatinous zooplankton that nothing wants to eat. I hijack this scientific term and use it to talk about how in public debate the sea is being simplified. Numerous well-meaning NGO campaigns resort to simplistic devices such as the traffic light system, whereby red is bad. Even these have been further dumbed down now to only “green” ticks.
As a longtime feminist, and writer, my turn to fish has disconcerted many. It does, however, follow from my many studies of various aspects of eating. I also challenge how in current discussions about the Anthropocene, “age of the human,” gender seems to be passé. From a discussion of mermaids through to the lives of fisherwomen, I seek to elevate gendered and queer matters of human-fish entanglement. At a conceptual level I grapple with how gender and sexuality, as well as ethnicity and class, have been squeezed out of academic discussions about the Anthropocene, climate change and the more-than-human. I seek to recover the lost stories of the women who have followed fish, and to hear what happens to human-fish settlements when the fish disappear.
Two instances of this ground the chapter in history – the rise and fall of the herring industry in Scotland that lasted from the nineteenth century until post WW II, and the collapse of the cod fisheries of the Great Banks off Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. The women who form the overwhelming workforce in fish processing, as well as the fishwives who kept the books of family fish businesses could see that a crisis was looming. In the male-dominated world of scientists and fisheries managers, their voices weren’t counted; they didn’t matter.