Free Man With a Pan by John Donahue Page A

Greenberg is the author most recently of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, National Geographic, Vogue, and many other publications. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow as well as a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow, he lives and works in New York City and Lake Placid, New York.
    My current family food budget is governed by the convergence of two troubling and important phenomena:
1. The global decline of oceanic fisheries
2. The rapid and imprudent spending of my book advance
    For the past three years I have been writing a book about the global decline of oceanic fisheries. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars uncovering the truth but have been sent back to the drawing board by my editors no less than four times, rewriting, researching, respending more and more money that I don’t have. It is all my fault. I should have read my contract. Before I can get the second half of my book advance, the editors must vet. The lawyers must vet. The proofreaders must vet. Everyone must vet. But with a family to feed, I can’t offer up “vetting” as an excuse for not putting food on the table.
    Which is why I ended up having to contribute directly to the global decline of oceanic fisheries.
    On a bone-chilling day in February around 3:00 a.m., I stepped aboard the party fishing boat Sea Otter out of Montauk, New York, with the idea of trying to catch some cod. Cod, in case you’re not aware of it, used to be the most astoundingly bountiful source of wild food in the world. Jesus, there were a lot of cod. Those stories of colonists lowering buckets over the rails and pulling up fish? Cod. But like me, humanity blew its advance. If humans had just had a little restraint and caught the majority of the cod every year instead of building the biggest boats ever made and then catching almost all the cod, we and the codfish would be in much better shape. Seriously, if you go to a fishing ground and catch 60 percent of the cod and leave 40 percent of the cod in the water, generally you’ll have enough cod for next year, because your average cod lays millions of eggs and the population can replace itself pretty quickly. But humans didn’t do that. In Atlantic Canada, for example, they caught 95 percent of the cod, and now the cod that are left are runts compared to the behemoths that used to dominate. Humans have artificially selected a whole new race of minicod by catching and eating all the big ones. As a result of all this bad behavior, a pound of cod, which used to cost a few bucks, now retails in New York supermarkets at around fourteen dollars—way out of the ballpark for my food budget.
    But in some places, humanity may have started to learn its lesson. In U.S. waters, some cod breeding grounds have been closed to fishing for nearly twenty years. And slowly cod have started trickling back south, down the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and finally within range of Montauk, Long Island. A cod-fishing trip on the Sea Otter costs $140. I reasoned that if the cod really had returned and I could scrape together a decent catch, I could put fish back on my table without taking out another advance on my credit card.
    The Sea Otter was cheaper than the other Montauk boats and it showed—there were no tables, no seats to speak of, just two long, narrow benches girding the cabin. But despite the discomfort and the fact that it was a Wednesday—a day when the usual working-class clientele of a party fishing boat should be otherwise engaged—word had gotten out that “the cod were back,” and the boat was “railed,” that is, so full that the rails were going to be packed shoulder to shoulder when we finally got around to fishing. I settled down on the narrow prisoner’s bench on the boat’s port side and eventually nodded off on the shoulder of a large plumber from Lindenhurst. Two hours later,