KEY POINTS:
In the 1960s, the Canadian cod fishery was the largest in the world. Two thousand boats from a dozen countries were catching more than 800,000 tonnes of cod a year off the coast of Newfoundland.
In 1974, the Canadian government set quotas to manage the catch, reserving half for its own fishermen. It was a political move aimed at protecting the local industry, rather than an expression of doubt in the fishery's future.
The prevailing view of Canadian cod had been set in stone ever since Thomas Huxley, in 1883, proclaimed that "the cod fishery ... and probably all the great fisheries are inexhaustible".
In the late 1980s, cod numbers began to decline. In 1992, when a two-year moratorium was imposed, the total estimated weight of the fish left in the water was 22,000 tonnes.
Sixteen years later, the fishery has still to recover. Canadian cod are gone, and it looks like they're not coming back. How did this happen? In his lively new account of why we should be paying more attention to which fish we eat, Taras Grescoe runs quickly through the many plausible explanations that have been offered. Ocean currents did it. (They changed course, and took the plankton supply with them, leaving the cod to starve).
The ozone hole did it. (The plankton all died from a UV overdose). It was the seals. (Greenpeace stopped us killing them, and the damn things ate all the cod). It was the Spaniards. (Spain was the most rapacious of Canada's competitors in making the most of the fishery while it lasted). No, Grescoe says briskly. It was us. All of us. We caught them, we ate them, and we kept doing it until they were gone. And that, in a nutshell, is what we are doing to most of the fisheries we haven't already exhausted.
Describing himself as "a fish-lover, but not a fish-hugger", Grescoe sets out on a global search for an ethical way to eat as many fish as possible. He hits the great fish markets and seafood restaurants of New York, London, Tokyo, and a dozen other cities (none in New Zealand, or the Southern Hemisphere). He talks to fishermen and scientists, to celebrity chefs and cookbook writers.
The result is a fast-moving, easy-to-read combination of travel book, food book, and alarming study of unfolding ecological collapse. Ninety per cent of the top level predatory fish, such as tuna, marlin and swordfish, have been caught.
Some ecologists are predicting that at the current rate of exploitation, all major fish stocks will have collapsed by 2048. The reason for this catastrophic prospect is well understood, and simple - lots of hungry people, lots of money to be made, and the grand old "tragedy of the commons" logic which says that if you don't catch that fish, it will be caught by someone else.
So what do we do? Grescoe's answer, in brief, is that we have to become better informed. Find out where the sustainable fisheries are, insist on labelling to record where all the fish on sale in our shops came from, and eat smart. If we do that, he says, we will leave a living ocean for our grandchildren.
Bottomfeeder: How the Fish on our Plates is Killing our Planet
By Taras Grescoe (MacMillan $34.99)
* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
