SCOTLAND: May 28, 2015 — Cod love the icy cold waters of the North Sea — and British people love eating cod.
But a decade ago, it looked like people were eating the fish to the brink of collapse. Now the trend has turned around, and the cod are coming back.
We pick up this fish tale, which seems to be on its way to a happy ending, at an early morning fish auction in Fraserburgh, Scotland, where buyers and sellers are lined up alongside hundreds of boxes containing cod, hake, monkfish, sole and every other kind of fish you can imagine from the North Sea.
This auction is not a place for fancy chefs and home cooks. The sales are in bulk, and most of the buyers and sellers here come from generations of fishermen. Like market superintendent Ian Buchan — he spent most of his life at sea, until it became just too hard to catch fish.
“People were saying there was no cod. Ten years before I stopped, at least 150 miles to get fish. Now, 20 miles. Fish is everywhere,” Buchan says.
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