Nothing, however, compares with the fate of cod. In the late fifteenth century, the explorer John Cabot found cod in incredible numbers on the eastern banks of North America—shallow areas of water popular with bottom-feeding fish like cod. Some of these banks were vast. Georges Banks off Massachusetts is bigger than the state it abuts. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland is bigger still and for centuries was always dense with cod. They were thought to be inexhaustible. Of course they were anything but.

By 1960, the number of spawning cod in the north Atlantic had fallen to an estimated 1.6 million metric tons. By 1990 this had sunk to 22,000 metric tons. In commercial terms, the cod were extinct. "Fishermen," wrote Mark Kurlansky in his fascinating history, Cod, "had caught them all." The cod may have lost the western Atlantic forever. In 1992, cod fishing was stopped altogether on the Grand Banks, but as of last autumn, according to a report in Nature, stocks had not staged a comeback. Kurlansky notes that the fish of fish fillets and fish sticks was originally cod, but then was replaced by haddock, then by redfish, and lately by Pacific pollock. These days, he notes drily, "fish" is "whatever is left."