not to agree with marine biologist Sylvia
Earle, whom Ellis sees at a whaling commission meeting. He asks her why an
industry seems so intent on destroying
its own livelihood. “Think of oil, timber,
coal,” she tells him. “Whenever humans
have had the opportunity to exploit a natural resource, they have over-exploited it.”
Mark Kurlansky is at >rst glance less
outraged than Ellis, and yet The Last Fish
Tale is no less a call to arms than Tuna.
Kurlansky takes us through the history of
Gloucester, Massachusetts, “America’s
most original town.” He paints a vivid
picture of a scrappy, individualistic,
proudly blue-collar community that also
embraced artists and dreamers. Writing
from the >sherman’s point of view, he
provides a window onto a rapidly vanishing lifestyle.
There are multiple threads to Gloucester’s story, which Kurlansky expertly
weaves together. There’s the story of the
immigrants—Sicilian, Irish, Scandinavian,
Jewish, and Portuguese—who shaped the
town. There’s the story of the >sh that
brought them there—the famed cod
stocks, but also halibut, haddock, whiting,
pollack, herring, mackerel, and later, when
those >sh grew scarce, red>sh, skate, and
Cape shark. There’s the story of >shing
boats, schooners, then steam-powered
vessels, then giant trawlers. And there’s
the evolution of >shing, from hook-and-line, a di;cult, backbreaking craft, to
multiple lines, increasing yields, and
eventually to dragging, which has been
described as “strip-mining the sea.”
It’s shocking how soon >shermen realized dragging the ocean would harm >sh
stocks by killing juveniles: Kurlansky
describes a parliamentary protest that
England’s >shermen lodged against dragging nets in 1376. By the 1880s, when the
>rst trawling vessel arrived in Gloucester,
the British were already convening commissions to consider banning them. In
1911, Gloucester >shermen asked for leg-
islation prohibiting trawling, describing it
as “the greatest danger the >sheries have
ever faced.”
Fast forward eighty years, to the collapse of the North American cod >shery,
and you have to ask, What happened How
could we have failed to heed the warnings
of the people closest to the resource?
Kurlansky gives a distressing account of
the antipathy between >shermen and
environmentalists. While the two groups
occasionally unite, as in the >ght to prevent oil drilling on Georges Bank,
Kurlansky suggests environmentalists have often failed to
separate small >shermen
from the real enemy: the
powerful industrial >shing
companies. Furthermore, regulation has too often played
directly into the hands of the
behemoths. Small >shermen
struggle to eke out a living
under “days at sea” restrictions, while giant factory
ships haul in plenty under the
same code.
Like Ellis, Kurlansky paints a harrowing picture: an ecosystem in peril and a
world in maddening denial. He doesn’t
pretend to have answers. But in weaving
together the story of a town, its people, and
its environment, he shows that when a
natural resource is damaged, human culture pays a price as well—in homogeneity
as well as lost pro>ts. Unfortunately, we
seem all too willing to sacri>ce real social
diversity for sanitized nostalgia. Kurlansky
closes with an album of sorry snapshots
of tourism replacing an ages-old way of
seaside life. Gloucester’s cod are gone—
but you can buy cod-shaped cookies there,
in the souvenir shops catering to the
town’s new clientele. The cookies are
called “Endangered Species.”
Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing
Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies.
Meat: A Love Story
My Year in Search of
the Perfect Meal
by susan bourette
Putnam, 2008. $24.95, 288 pages.
CAN YOU EAT MEAT with a clear
conscience? It’s one of those gasoline-on-the->re questions bound to ignite hot
emotions, not only among old-school
omnivores but also with the yoga-calm
vegans. Both camps have unequivocal
answers. But what of the recent ecogas-tronomes, who, like me,
might be wondering if the
local, slow, and artisanal
movements are merely
justifying the unnecessary
consumption of animals,
albeit ones that are pastured, free-ranging, and
sung to sleep each night.
For conscious eaters with
meat angst, Meat: A Love
Story is the right read at
the right time. And it is a
love story, because what else but hot, blind,
irrational love could explain our species’
continued consumption of ?esh, which
imperils the Earth, our health, and perhaps
our souls?
If anyone should have turned away
from meat-eating, it should have been the
author. As a reporter she worked undercover at a pork processing plant where she
spent a traumatic week slicing the cheeks
out of hogs’ heads. Even so, she was
unable to stick to a diet of plant protein.
Although amusing at times, the book’s
subtitle, “My Year in Search of the Perfect
Meal,” is somewhat misleading. This is
no delightful culinary romp. Although
funny (Bourette’s culinary failings are met
with requisite self-deprecation), the back-story of meat—the blood and viscera of the
dead and furry reality of the living—isn’t
pretty. Adding to the overall unease is
Bourette’s discomfort with maneuvering
