When it comes to biographies you expect the subject to be a celebrity, political leader or cultural icon. Not a fish – biographies aren’t written about fish. But Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod is just that, a self-described “biography of the fish that changed the world.”
Written over a decade ago it is not the story of a singular fish, but rather a history of a biological species – the Atlantic cod. Kurlansky writes about this fish as a food, as a resource, as an economic unit. But he also writes about the fisherman who’ve pursued it across the Atlantic and who’ve depended on it for their livelihood.
Blending equal measures history, reportage and culinary knowledge from the Atlantic coasts, it is a remarkable book.
But apart from its fascinating tale of consistent overfishing, which has doomed cod’s commercial future and threatened, perhaps fatally, its biological survival, it is also peppered with fascinating ancillary detail.
Did you know Basque fishermen have been catching Atlantic cod off the coast of North America since long before Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World? And that the traditional wood cabins of Nova Scotia are red because they were painted with cod liver oil which stains them that colour?



