During the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian fisheries
regularly produced more fish than markets could absorb, driving down
profits and wages. To address this, both industry and government sought
to stimulate domestic consumption via increased advertising. In Eating
the Ocean Brian Payne explores how 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.
The goal was first to make seafood a central element of a "wholesome"
diet as a solution to a perceived nutritional crisis, and, second, to
aid industry recovery and growth while decreasing Canadian fisheries'
dependency on foreign markets. But fishery managers and policymakers
fundamentally miscalculated consumer demand, wrongly assuming that
Canadians could and would eat more seafood. Fisheries continued to
extract more fish than the environment and the market could sustain, and
the collapse of the nation's fisheries that we are now seeing has as
much to do with failed assessments of market demand as it does with
faulty extraction practices. Using internal communications between
industry leaders and Ottawa bureaucrats, as well as advertising and
promotional material published in the nation's leading magazines,
national and local newspapers, and radio programming, Eating the Ocean
traces the flawed understanding of not only supply but demand, a
misguided gamble that caused fisheries to become the most mismanaged
resource economy in early-twentieth-century Canada.
