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1 " Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. "
― Mark Kurlansky , Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
2 " Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is a part of evolution. "
3 " To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn’t need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world. Columbus had claimed the entire new world for Spain. "
4 " Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish - especially cod, haddock, and plaice - because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class. "
5 " Cod meat has virtually no fat (.3 percent) and is more than 18 percent protein, which is unusually high even for fish. And when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein - almost 80 percent protein. "
6 " Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant "with potatoes". "
7 " There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks? "
8 " By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation. "
9 " gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops. "
10 " The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. "
11 " Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance. "
12 " Nature remains focused on survival. "
13 " The technology never reverses itself. It creates new technology to confront new sets of problems. "
14 " Nature may have even less patience than politicians. "
15 " Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. "
16 " When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages. "
17 " The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish". "
18 " In Middle English, cod meant "a bag or a sack", or by inference, "a scrotum", which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece. "
19 " Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. "Va callar!" (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge. "
20 " Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish. "
