Two Kinds of Hunger

~ Cod by Mark Kurlansky ~

When a fox gets hungry it hunts for food. When it has caught and eaten something, it knows it’s full and then rests or plays or does whatever it is that foxes do when they’re not hungry anymore. For most of our history, when we were hunter-gatherers, things must have been the same with us. We might have cached a small store of food to help us survive the winter, but we knew better than to stockpile more than we could reasonably expect to eat.

Things changed. Somewhere along the line we learned the trick of turning the excess we might acquire of one commodity into a whole host of other goods, through trade. Extra meat or grain might be traded for other kinds of consumables or for handicrafts or luxury items of one sort or another. Item A was suddenly convertible into Items X, Y, and Z. And while Item A might be something I had limited use for, I would gladly take as much of Items X, Y and Z as I could get.

You might say that there are two kinds of hunger. There’s the hunger that is easily sated, and then there is the insatiable hunger: I can only eat so many steaks of venison, but I can never have too many golden cups. It doesn’t matter that the first (as food) is a necessity and the latter is not. Such is my hunger for golden cups that I will gladly kill every last deer in my hunting grounds to convert them into more golden cups. Finally, through my own folly, there will be no deer left to satisfy even the first kind of hunger.

Kurlansky’s book charts the effects of this same process on the humble codfish. Or, you might say, the not-so-humble codfish, for in days of yore it apparently stretched across the sea like some composite Leviathan. The cod was infinitely greater in number then and the nations fought, literally and viciously, for the right to catch it. It was the salty gold of the North Atlantic, the inexhaustible resource. Until it was exhausted.

Following the cod through Western history is, to me, the fascination of this book. We begin with the Basques, who had discovered the great codfishing grounds of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks (and quite possibly had discovered the New World) well before the time of Columbus. But Kurlansky leads us also through the colonial era, the entanglement of the fish in the slave trade, and its pivotal role in the American Revolution and the independence of Iceland.

It’s unfortunate the story must end as a tragedy. It’s tempting to blame steam-power, trawling nets, and industrialized fishing techniques. But the real villain here is that second kind of hunger, the acquisitive spirit that wants always to turn more and more of Item A into more and more of Items X, Y, and Z. If we could save ourselves from that, we might save the cod as well.