Description

Cold-blooded, slippery, wet and strange: fish can be hard to think of as fellow animals and easier to consider as food. But what do we know of these creatures on our plates, and what do we know of how they got there? In Every Last Fish, Rose George takes us inside the vast legal industries that support our appetite for fish fingers and salmon sandwiches, and the equally colossal illegal fishing trade whose practices and standards are unmonitored and often dangerous. It introduces us to the men (and it is mostly men) who fish, the women (and it is mostly women) who process the flesh and strive to keep fishing communities afloat. It takes us from Alaska to Senegal, via Scotland, Norway, and Massachusetts, and from the nets on the surface to the murky depths of the sea bed. It will transform the way you look at fish and change your understanding of what lies behind the inscrutable eye that looks back at you.

Publisher Review

‘Rose George is a fearless and dogged reporter, one of our best… [She] writes with heart, heat, and wit… I’ve loved all Rose George’s books, but I think I love this one most’ — Mary Roach Every Last Fish, Rose George’s exploration of commercial overfishing, is a reminder of how careless we are with our planet’s vanishing bounty of underwater life. It’s a warning of the consequences of such carelessness. But it’s also a story of our beautiful and fascinating underwater worlds and of the sometimes unexpected ways we try not to destroy but to protect them… — Deborah Blum * Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century * Once again Rose George, equipped with wide-ranging curiosity and bracing dashes of coruscating humor, takes us on an astoundingly eye-opening journey through the overlooked and everyday-this time the toll, in terms human and pelagic, of our consumption of fish — Tom Vanderbilt * author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and Beginners * It’s hard to imagine creatures more different from us than fish. Yet as Rose George reminds us in this rollicking, often elegiac account, our fates are intertwined. Every Last Fish deftly captures our shared story through the humans: eccentric, passionate, and trepidatious — Florence Williams * author of The Nature Fix: Why Being in Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative * [George] presents her material with as much aplomb as a top chef presenting a grilled Dover sole… Honest, clear-sighted and recommendable * Literary Review *