What happened to cod, anyway?

Another thing we did with Alex's family was visit a kind of seaside museum/conservation center a little way up the coast from here.

Among other things, we learned about how cod was this awesome fish that all the colonists just adored... They even made it part of Massachusetts' logo for a while. So they kept fishing it and fishing it, and just loving this tasty fish! There was some concern about overfishing when they started being able to catch less, but they switched to smaller boats and were still catching so darn many that there COULDN'T be a problem!

Fast-forward a couple of centuries and the numbers of cod being caught were still plummeting and the average size was way down.... it's no surprise that the whole cod-fishing racket crashed in the early '90s. The choice was either to let cod disappear from the region entirely, or to impose strict government controls on fishing.... guess which happened.

So the good news is, the cod population is hypothetically making a comeback. The bad news is, cod is no longer the available fish-and-chips of choice.

This relates back to me because I started my life in a Massachusetts fishing town where if your fish didn't come out of the ocean THAT DAY and get cooked into a state of perfect deliciousness, it was an embarrassment and the establishment just ought to be ashamed. I used to get fish and chips about 1/2 the times our family ate out, and that was that. I remember that at a certain point, I stopped liking fish and chips because the fish just stopped tasting so good, and got kind of chewy. I thought it was a series of bad cooks, or because we were at an out-of-town restaurant--if I thought about it at all. I mostly didn't, and just got burgers instead.

Apparently that was the demise of cod and transition to haddock and other white fish as fish-and-chips staples. So now I can (unfortunately) say I have been a first-hand witness to an ecological semi-disaster. Think friendly thoughts about the recovering cod population--I really do think that if people weren't dumb we could have our cod and eat it too!