I’m interested not only in fish, but in food, and I’ll sometimes find myself reading a book about some aspect of food history, the development of American cuisine, or a similar subject.
I just finished Lost
Feast, by Lenora Newman. Subtitled
“Culinary extinction and the future of food,”
Lost Feast chronicles once-abundant foods that have
been lost, beginning with Pleistocene megafauna such as the mammoth and the
aurochs (the latter the imposing, wild ancestor of our domestic cow), through
the more modern extinction of the passenger pigeon, which was once shipped in
barrels to provide cheap nutrition to the new hordes of factory workers in
industrializing urban centers, to the varieties of fruits and vegetables that
have been sacrificed to serve the needs of mechanized agriculture.
Some such losses, like that of the mammoth and aurochs, took
place over millennia. Some, like the
extinction of the passenger pigeon, took place over centuries, while others,
such as the loss of more than half of the named cultivars of the tomato, took decades
and is still going on.
As I read the book, I began to think of the fish that
are gone from my table, that disappeared in the course of my lifetime. Ms. Newman spent some time discussing issues
with seafood, but in a book, no matter how well written, such discussions can
feel too abstract to take personally.
When I think of the fish that have become lost to me, even
if they remain scattered thinly across a few pieces of ocean, the ghost of their
taste and texture still haunts my tongue. I can think of the times when I caught
them, and the friends and family who were once able to share the fishing and
the food, but never will again.
Fall is a good time for such thoughts, because the lost fish
all favored cool weather.
Winter flounder was probably foremost among them...
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