Word: fishly
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...Founding Fish is a worthy addition to the newly popular genre of the one-fish book (joining Mark Kurlansky's best-selling Cod, among others). Its subject, the relatively unsung American shad, is a large and feisty fish found mostly in rivers in the northeastern U.S. It is the shad's misfortune to be excessively tasty--its scientific name is Alosa sapidissima, the latter word meaning "most savory." It is also notoriously bony: a Native American legend has the shad being created from a porcupine turned inside...
...prizewinning author of Annals of the Former World, performs a series of virtuosic variations on the theme of shad, including its role in history, its heroic migratory habits--a single shad can travel 10,000 miles in its lifetime--and the author's sometimes excruciating attempts to catch the fish. "There is a God," he writes, gazing wistfully at his shadless line, "a God who knows what He is looking at and enjoys making decisions." (The emotion you're feeling right now is shad-enfreude...
McPhee may not be the consummate angler, but he has a gimlet eye for the mot juste, as when he describes the "Cretaceous" look of a backhoe. If the book occasionally strays into arcane areas of fish biology more interesting to hardened pescophiles than general readers, the latter should just pick out those portions, like the bones of the shad itself. They'll still get a well-balanced and decidedly savory meal. --By Lev Grossman
...British Columbian waters. They produce some 50,000 tons of salmon a year, most of it destined for the U.S. market. Young men work their way along the floating walkways around the 10,000-sq.-ft. pens, tossing brown food pellets that are met by a swirl of fish. In these 12 pens, there are about 1 million salmon, each a delicious, silver-sided beauty, and when harvested in 18 months, they will fetch more than $10 million in retail sales...
What could be wrong with this picture? The farm-grown harvest is cheap, predictable and year-round. "A fillet of farmed salmon in your supermarket is fresher than a wild fish netted at sea that can take five to six days to get to harbor," says Odd Grydeland, 54, former president of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association and an executive at Heritage Salmon, based in New Brunswick, B.C. Moreover, each farm-grown salmon means, in theory, one less fish taken from wild stocks that have been declining for decades. (Farm-raised fish now make up most of the fresh...