David Profumo

Let Them Eat Hake

The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Our Disappearing Fisheries

By

Jonathan Cape 268pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Call it opsophagy, fish epicurism, or outright gourmanderie – whatever your angle, the world’s eating habits are seriously threatening the wild stocks in our oceans. That mighty scombroid, the bluefin tuna, is a case in point: largely thanks to Homo japonicus, this blue and silver gladiator is now, pound for pound, the most expensive fish on the planet (a single carcase having fetched over fifty-five thousand dollars in Tokyo), and its population is down to a mere 10 per cent of what it was in 1970. There is no moratorium in sight, and it’s anyone’s guess what the flesh of the last ever tunny will fetch in the ichthyolatrous Tsukiji market.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    Follow Us