reading: cod

I’m not finished reading Cod (Penguin Books, 1997) by Mark Kurlansky yet, but I wanted to post up some of the most interesting things from the book so far, in my esteem:

- No one knows exactly why cod have a small dangling piece of flesh below their lower lip.
- Cod has just about no fat and is more than 18% protein, more than most other fish. When it is tried, the water in its flesh evaporates and the meat contains about 80% protein.
- There are more than 200 species of cod, almost all of which live in cold waters in the Northern Hemisphere.
- Because cod feed on sea life that thrives where warm and cold waters meet, cod are almost exclusively caught in waters where two currents of different temperatures meet.
- While a cod can lay between 3 and 9 million eggs, it is so difficult for eggs to thrive that the cod population would stabilize if even just two of the eggs survive to maturity.
- Traditionally, there had been a much higher demand for dried, salt cod as opposed to fresh cod.