Far Away from Far Away

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This post introduces L. Sasha Gora’s recently published Global Environment article, “Cod and its Oil, Cuisine and its Supplements: Fish Fragmentation, Commodity Connections and Naturalising Resources in Newfoundland.”

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I, a driving school dropout, finally learned to drive at the age of 38 so that I could travel to an island off of an island to study fish. Fogo is its name—the largest of the offshore islands in what has been the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador since 1949. The fish is, well, fish. “To say fish here is to mean cod,” a chef told me as soon as I arrived.

To reach Fogo Island, you catch the ferry in a port called Farewell. Port, however, is an overstatement. In Farewell Newfoundland runs out of land and feels like the island that its size often makes you forget it is. At this edge the ferry suspends this ending (at least for one more stretch; Flat Earthers consider Fogo Island one of the four corners of the world). After passing Change Islands, the ferry drops you off in Stag Harbour just shy of an hour later. Before there were cars and roads to drive them on, the ferry would land in Seldom-Come-By. Yes, prose writes itself in Newfoundland but, more importantly, places remember the stories of earlier worlds, the people who named them and the knowledge that such names champion, obscure, or erase.

The island has no traffic lights, let alone public buses, and so out of fear of having to translate my charm into a ride from a friendly neighbour to go procure groceries, I enrolled in driving school in Munich. The month that I left the rest of my life on hold to dedicate to intense lessons overlapped with the EUFA European Championship, which meant that not only did I learn that in German a blind spot is called Todeswinkel, translating directly as “angle of death,” but also how to swerve around tipsy football fans testing their balance on e-scooters in search of the arena.

But before making it as far as Farewell, I had to first fly from Munich to Frankfurt (please forgive me) then from Frankfurt to Montreal, and then from Montreal to Saint John’s. I had to fly over and beyond Newfoundland to get off of one plane and board another to fly two and a half hours back east.

Fogo Island is often shortened to just Fogo (I, too, am guilty of doing this in this text), which is also the name of the island’s largest community. However, as the geographer Daniel Banoub uncovers, Fogo Island rarely appears in historical “accounts of missionaries, merchants, and early historians.” He therefore attempts to trace the emergence of the “Island” pinned to Fogo’s end. It was sometime between 1940 and 1969 that “Fogo Island” became “the dominant way of speaking about the area.”1 Furthermore, Banoub argues that “‘Fogo Island’ should not be treated as a geological assumption,” an example of what he calls an anti-essential reading of place.2

Yet place is powerful. My trip to Newfoundland was generously bankrolled by a residency at Fogo Island Arts—the founding program of the Shorefast Institute. A social enterprise, Shorefast “unleashes the power of place so local communities can thrive in the global economy.” It’s able to do so, in part, thanks to a luxury inn, which the Harvard Business Review describes as “a strange and familiar way to reimagine capitalism.”3 Zita Cobb, who founded Shorefast together with her brothers, left Fogo, made a fortune elsewhere and, like a true Newfoundlander, returned.

“Fogo Island is far away from far away,” Zita says, “but it has always been part of the world.” Distance makes it connections even more visible. She taught me to pay attention to flight routes and detours, to think about how to travel to one place we often first have to travel to another, and what this says about how planes traverse the sky and how this differs from water and waves.

Zita also taught me that I had been mispronouncing the province’s name. Blame it on how my tongue hangs onto having grown up in Toronto—the city where I failed my driver’s license test as a teenager—continuing its bad habit of squishing two or even three syllable words into only one. “How do you pronounce Newfoundland?” I heard Zita ask a mixed crowd of islanders and come-from-aways at a Fogo Island Arts event. “It rhymes with understand.”

All of this is a detour. Text to lay over, to over lay, while thinking about the places you need to pass through to continue elsewhere. About how places connect and disconnect, and how ideas do too.

Brimstone Head
Brimstone Head. Credit: L. Sasha Gora.

A year before I traveled to Newfoundland, I received a grant from the Elite Network of Bavaria to join the University of Augsburg as the project director and principal investigator of the Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment research group. This means that in the middle of Europe and far away from the ocean, my team and I think about fish and shellfish and other creatures of the sea. These, however, are just specific examples; we also think more broadly, considering the relationship between eating and ecology at large and how, as I argue, eating is always an ecological act.

“Newfoundland does not make sense if you think about it in terms of roads. Pavement transforms distance, hiding how water connects one place to another.”

One of the first workshops I presented my cod research at after starting Off the Menu was organized by Elena Kochetkova, Matthias Heymann, and Ines Prodöhl at the University of Bergen (coincidentally, another cod capital). Dedicated to fats as “resources” across the world, I applied because although I had been studying cod as a food, and very occasionally as a fish, I hadn’t yet considered its oil, which at times has been just as—and in some places even more—popular than its fillets, whether they’re fresh, frozen, salted, or dried. The workshop then sparked a special issue of Global Environment, “Global Fat Resources: Connecting Themes, Approaches and Narratives, c. 1850–2020s.” My presentation rehearsed questions about what marks a food from a medicine and about what makes a resource “natural”—questions I packed with me to Fogo.

One of the many things that Fogo taught me—beyond how much I unexpectedly enjoy occupying the driver’s seat—is that Newfoundland does not make sense if you think about it in terms of roads. Pavement transforms distance, hiding how water connects one place to another. If you turn your back on roads and, instead, think from the water, distance changes yet again and sometimes it turns out that far away is not always that far.

Feature Image: Farewell ferry to Fogo Island. Credit: L. Sasha Gora.

Notes

  1. Daniel Banoub, “Fogo Island Arriving: An Anti-Essentialist Reading,” Newfoundland Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 33. ↩︎
  2. Ibid., 35. ↩︎
  3. Brian Trelstad, Wendy Smith, and Natalie Slawinski. “Shorefast: A Strange and Familiar Way to Reimagine Capitalism,” Harvard Business School Case 320-098, April 2020. (Revised May 2025). ↩︎

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L. Sasha Gora

L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food studies, the environmental humanities, and contemporary art. In 2023 she joined the University of Augsburg, where she leads the Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment junior research group, funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria.

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