In an interview on The Sea

I love the title of your first book, Cod.

Yes, that’s a fascinating small book by Mark Kurlansky and it really is mainly about cod, but he makes it immensely interesting and he traces the human’s acquaintance with this fish back for a thousand years. Then he talks a lot about how amazingly abundant it was, especially off northern areas of Europe and Newfoundland, Canada and so on, and how when John Cabot went over there in 1497, he just had to put a bucket in the water and it filled up with cod. In the very same area in 1992 a moratorium was placed on cod fishing because the population was so low. It is still commercially dead and is on the way to being biologically dead.

Why is that? What on earth happened?

It was just amazingly overfished. It was fished before the time when there were strict regulations, and when Portugal and Spain came into those waters in the 1960s, 70s and 80s with the big trawlers and bottom trawlers, they just scooped them all up. Then when they were pushed out by Canada, the Canadian fishermen took over and fished the rest of them. It’s really a story about human greed and not taking the advice that they were fishing too hard.

That’s really depressing. I remember in the 1970s and 80s in Britain cod was just something you had, the cheapest fish you could eat. Now we go to the supermarket and spend £15 on a little fillet.

Yes, the population is severely depleted around your areas. Iceland is still pretty good because they’ve managed their fishing very well, but most other places have not.