In places this is indeed an eye-widening and gulp-inducing read. Among other horrors, Every Last Fish covers the abundant sea lice of salmon farms, the rampant illegal dredging of marine protected areas, the corroded wounds of “salt holes” in the hands of fish-gutting “herring girls”, a Scottish trawling firm that has been the subject of a criminal investigation for allegedly trafficking and abusing workers, the collapse of African fisheries because all the fish are being hoovered up to feed foreign fish farms, and the miserable, despised work of fisheries observers, stuck on dangerous ships with crews who regard them as enemies — a job described as “an endless wet nightmare of huge seas, puking, pork chops, and sexing crab”.
The statistics alone are alarming. Britain enjoys perhaps 5 per cent of the fish stocks it used to have. (“There are no gaps in your fishmonger’s display case,” George explains, “because of a highly complex global seafood supply system. The gaps are in the ocean.”) Or to bring that statistic home, how about another one: the average wooden fishing boat operating in the 1900s would have caught perhaps 16 times as many fish in an hour as a boat today. And what about the fish you buy? One in five sold will have been caught by a vessel operating outside the law. Perhaps half may be mislabelled as a different species.
And then there’s the brute fact that all this activity is, of course, a kind of killing. Between one and three trillion fish, George reports, are caught every year, although the fishing industry is so poorly regulated and monitored that it is hard to be sure of the numbers. Fish are usually counted in tonnes. And don’t even think about the “discards”. For every shrimp trawled in the Gulf of Mexico, four times that weight of “by-catch” is thrown overboard.
George is a muscular advocate for what you might call fish rights. “Fishes,” she writes (and she uses that eccentric plural because she wants us to think of fish as individual animals, not as unindividuated protein), “are alive and they have lives that we take from them because we are hungry or because they are tasty. And how do we take them? We stamp on their heads; we suffocate them so their eyes pop out; we stick hooks in their mouths and pretend their mouths are numb.”
Fish, she insists, definitely, obviously feel pain. “Sharks have friends. Minnows shout to each other.” Cleaner wrasses, which remove parasites from bigger fish, can pass a cognitive test that proves whether or not they can recognise themselves in a mirror. George not unreasonably points out that if, say, farm animals were treated like fish there would be something of an outcry.
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If all that sounds ugly, grim and maybe even repellent, it really is not. What redeems the book is George’s adventurousness, warmth and, especially, her empathy with fisherfolk.
Nobly, given that seasickness, she goes out on a crabber with some of the “Filey Few” that still sail out of that once-thriving Yorkshire port: “Three men, all old: one in a neon orange beanie hat, one with a smile, and one Rex.” She goes trawling off Newlyn, too, and clearly respects the trawlerman skipper, Tom. When she asks him whether the fish he is gutting are alive or dead, “He looks surprised. ‘Alive, I suppose.’ I’m troubled both by the answer and that this articulate, smart man of the sea had not asked himself the question.”
The most emotional encounters are onshore. In a Leeds suburb she tracks down three Ghanaian fishermen who escaped abuse and murderous working conditions on a Scottish scallop dredger. The evidently traumatised Joseph tells her, “It’s a very slavery job actually.” In an ordinary fish-and-chip shop in Skipton, she asks the man behind the fryer where the fish comes from. “The sea?” he replies. At a hot, stinking fish-processing station in Senegal, she asks an 83-year-old woman how the work has changed. “Before,” the woman tells her, “there was fish.”
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Getting people to say significant things, then framing them so they resonate, is an underregarded writer’s skill. George has it in spades. She has a good eye for history too. The book focuses on the present, but we hear the stories of women in particular. The herring girls, who followed the shoals up and down the east coast in their thousands. “Big Lil” Bilocca, who led a transformative protest in 1968, after three Hull trawlers went down within 30 days.
A tub-thumping environmentalist might have written an excruciating book on fishing. The abuses are so despair-inducing, the possibility of change so slight. George’s deep affection and respect for her subjects — fishers and fish — make this a book full of nuance and heart, as well as outrage.
Every Last Fish: What Fish Do for Us and What We Do to Them by Rose George (Granta £20 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
