George is the author of Ninety Percent of Everything (2013), a revelatory and unexpectedly funny book about the shipping industry. In her latest work, she returns to the sea to focus on the fishing industry, another subject that, despite the prevalence of seafood, most of us know little about. It\u2019s a startling account; much of what she shares will hit readers like a blast of shoreline wind. The details are unsettling. \u201cFish for awful statistics about ocean creatures and you will land a giant catch,\u201d she writes. \u201cFor every 300 turtles that swam in the Caribbean, there is now one.\u201d Industrialized fishing has been so destructive that \u201cwe spend twice as much effort to catch the same number of fishes as we did in the 1950s.\u201d Huge numbers of other creatures are accidentally captured: In this \u201cbycatch\u201d\u2014the industry term is \u201cdiscards\u201d\u2014300,000 whales and dolphins are killed every year. This doesn\u2019t even take into account illegal fishing. \u201cOne in every five fishes imported by Americans is illegally caught,\u201d the author writes. And then there\u2019s the nasty business of unwanted guests that plague salmon farms, leaving fish \u201chalf-eaten by lice.\u201d In her travels, George spends time with fishermen in her native Britain. The crew\u2019s blunt humor is evident when she vomits overboard: \u201cMore food for lobsters,\u201d they say. In a stirring chapter on bygone \u201cherring girls\u201d who gutted fish hour after hour, George describes how these women fought for better safety. It\u2019s still a dangerous profession: Every year, 100,000 fishermen die on the job. It doesn\u2019t help that in the U.S., there\u2019s a lack of training. Some observers, meantime, have mysteriously lost their lives when reporting on human rights violations. All the while, demand for seafood is rising. \u201cBy 2050, our fish consumption is predicted to double,\u201d George writes. \u201cWhere will it come from?\u201d It\u2019s little surprise that George herself does not eat fish.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
George is the author of Ninety Percent of Everything (2013), a revelatory and unexpectedly funny book about the shipping industry. In her latest work, she returns to the sea to focus on the fishing industry, another subject that, despite the prevalence of seafood, most of us know little about. It\u2019s a startling account; much of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}