Brian Payne, Eating the Ocean: Seafood and Consumer Culture in Canada, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 272 pgs. ISBN 9780228015987.
Reviewed by Jennifer Silver.
In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) formalized the rights of coastal nation-states to “explore, exploit, conserve and manage fisheries within 200 nautical miles (370.4 kilometers) of their shores.”1 Of course, many countries had established domestic fisheries and pursued the expansion of fleets well before that. Literature on colonialism and oceans, fisheries governance and industrialization, and state managerialism is robust, sometimes offering a global view2 and sometimes focusing on single countries or regions.3 Much of this work historicizes state fisheries policies and decision-making structures, detailing and critiquing the over-subsidization of industrial fishing and fleets, and revealing the geopolitical dynamics and political-economic structures that drive unsustainable harvesting and collapse.4 The institutionalization and normalization of bioeconomic objectives in state fisheries management agencies has also been a focus.5 Other literature details how and why fish have come to be understood and managed as amorphous “stocks,” and grapples with the ways that fisheries science separates these non-human ocean creatures out from broader sets of ecological and socio-cultural relations.6
Brian Payne’s Eating the Ocean: Seafood and Consumer Culture in Canada details Canadian government efforts and advertising intended to shape the citizenries’ view of fish in the early- to mid-twentieth century. We learn that, like fish, domestic “seafood consumers” were objects of managerial interest during this important time in Canadian fisheries history. Specifically, Payne demonstrates that “government-funded marketing called upon Canadian housewives to prepare more seafood meals to improve family health and aid an industry central to Canadian identity and heritage” (back cover). While not focused on fisheries science and stock management, the book resonates with other work that does because it details a clear managerial orientation toward the Canadian citizenry as consumers and the reproductive work of (women within) Canadian households.
The book has seven chapters: an introduction, conclusion, and five core chapters that present and draw interpretations from advertisements and other sources including reports, memos, and correspondence between figures in government and industry. Each core chapter is written around a different marketing theme and/or intended advertising target(s): state-making and nationalism; health and healthfulness; housewives and the modern kitchen; consumption as Depression-era stimulus; and World War Two patriotism. Payne details how advertisements employed imagery and themes, explores rationale and logics behind campaigns, and interrogates intended outcomes. Overall, the book is clearly organized, empirical material is well-presented, and it is enjoyable to follow along as Payne parses out takeaways and builds larger arguments through the chapters.
As readers, we get the opportunity to see some of the advertisements because many are included as full-page figures. Payne weaves in information and voices from other sources as the advertisements, and broader themes, are discussed. For example, Chapter 4 (Eating Our Way Out of Depression) includes a large advertisement from a 1940 issue of well-known Canadian magazine Maclean’s. It reads, “Women of Canada – you can help! The Canadian Lobster Industry needs your Support” (155). Payne narrates and gives detail in surrounding pages that helps us to appreciate the visual. He also complicates successes that some attributed to the campaign:
Most industry and industry-friendly papers celebrated the success of the canned-lobster campaign, which continued into 1941 with an additional $50,000 in government funding. In this case, there appears to be some evidence of increased domestic consumption, although it was largely the result of intense government control of the market. Not only did the federal government own a large stock of the product, but it also set up a Lobster Control Board […] Moreover, the Department of Fisheries was able to convince the Canadian military to add canned lobster to camp rations (153).
By the end of the fifth core chapter, Payne shows that many of the campaigns uncovered through the research did not fully live up to government and industry hopes. Yet, the idea of an industrialized, high-volume, “modern” model for Canadian fisheries was not questioned (and has yet to be meaningfully tempered). In Payne’s words: “[b]y seeking to broaden and diversify seafood consumption after about 1920, government and industry set the stage for a level of extraction far beyond what the environment could sustain and what the consumer market would have naturally been willing to absorb […] the level of seafood consumption in Canada never came close to the target goals of the marketing campaigns” (19).
Eating the Ocean is a well-researched and interesting read that contributes to scholarship on fisheries, and food studies more broadly, as well as to histories of natural resource management and policy, environmental bureaucracy, and food systems in Canada and other similar (e.g., Commonwealth) countries. The book reminds us that a deep and high-level commitment to high-volume industrial resource extraction often precedes the identification of stable and sufficiently wealthy consumer market(s). Advertising tropes target people while, as we know from literature on fisheries managerialism and bioeconomics, vessel subsidies and techno-scientific practices target the natural resource in question. Hopes of control form the foundation for both.
1 Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 2009. United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement. https://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/international/rsc-unfa-eng.htm. Last accessed: August 13, 2024.
2 E.g., Finley, C. (2019). All the boats on the ocean: how government subsidies led to global overfishing. University of Chicago Press.
3 E.g., Newell, D. (1999). Tangled webs of history: Indians and the law in Canada’s Pacific Coast fisheries. In Tangled Webs of History. University of Toronto Press.
4 E.g., Campling, L., & Colás, A. (2021). Capitalism and the sea: The maritime factor in the making of the modern world. Verso Books.
5 E.g., Wilson, D. C. (2009). The paradoxes of transparency: science and the ecosystem approach to fisheries management in Europe (p. 304). Amsterdam University Press.
6 E.g., Silver, J.J., Okamoto, D. Armitage, D., Alexander, S., Atleo, C., Burtt, J. Jones, R., Lee, L., Muhl, E-K., Stoll, J., Salomon, A. (2022). Fish, people, and systems of power: understanding and disrupting feedback between colonialism and fisheries science. The American Naturalist, 200(1), 168-180.
Feature image: Fish and Chips (2006). Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Jennifer Silver
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