European Reflections
- gcallah2
- Feb 5, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 6, 2023
I bet many of you had given up hope of ever hearing from me again on this platform. As the two months between my last post and this one dragged by, you wiped away gathering tears and steeled yourselves for a future without wix.com automated emails. Never fear - I am emerging from the darkness at my 6-month mark (halfway through my Watson) to give you an update on where I’ve been, and a few things I’ve noticed along the way.
In brief: after my time in Spain with the maríscadoras, I made my way down the coast of Portugal in December. At Christmas, I met up with Mary in Rome and we spent two weeks cruising around central Italy eating pistachio gelato and becoming wine snobs. In early January I crossed the border into southern France, where I have been for the past month.
Portugal and Bacalao
Portugal has a huge Atlantic coastline and a long history of fishing clearly displayed in paintings and ceramic art all along the coast. Many of the large Portuguese churches have these amazing blue and white tiled frescoes depicting giant sailing ships and seafaring images right alongside the religious ones. Above all, bacalao is the king of Portuguese fish.
Bacalao is Atlantic cod that has been split, dried, and preserved with salt so it can hang splendidly from display hooks in shop windows across Portugal, or lie piled high in straw baskets. It has a very distinctive smell that permeates small-scale Portuguese grocery stores. Every single restaurant that serves Portuguese dishes serves bacalao in many guises: soaked and baked, shredded into a casserole, made into fritters and cheese pastries.
At this point I must admit that I don’t like bacalao. The smell made me queasy, and even when it was cooked with nice veggies and olive oil I found it to be kind of like regular whitefish, but tougher and worse. I much prefer a nice grilled sardine.
Anyway, the strange thing about bacalao is that this fish – the uncontested beating heart of Portuguese seafood – is caught way up in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. It’s popularity in Portugal dates to the 14th century, when preserved cod was used for sailor’s rations during the age of big colonial maritime voyages. From the 14th to the 16th centuries Portuguese fishermen caught, salted, and dried bacalao in Newfoundland, but eventually the British colonial powers in Canada wised up to this and started to kick out all the foreign fisherman camping on the shores of Newfoundland to salt and dry their cod for transport. Not to be deterred, the Portuguese fishermen started bringing their cod back to Portugal in vats of brine for villagers to salt and dry themselves. Today, most of the bacalao Portugal eats was caught and preserved in Norway.
Although this is a fascinating story of how evolving economic, ecological, and political landscapes changes the fishing habits of a nation, it was difficult to find people involved in the bacalao industry outside of restaurants and grocery stores. Maybe because they’re mostly in Norway, or perhaps I just wasn't able to make the right connections in the world of industrial fishing and shipping. I wish I had succeeded in finding some women working in the harvest or processing part of this industry, and I still have so many unanswered questions about what that’s like.
One recurring takeaway from my conversations with fisherwomen over the past 6 months is that schedules matter when it comes to whether women are involved or excluded. Seaweed farming, shell fishing, and flying fish boning are all jobs dominated by women precisely because they allow for a certain level of daily and seasonal flexibility to take care of domestic responsibilities. If you are obliged to return home each day to take care of a child or elderly relative, you are automatically unable to go bombing off for five months at a time to catch cod in the North Atlantic. This skews the gender composition and means that long-haul fishing boats often lack the infrastructure and culture needed for women to feel safe at work. Does this hold true for the bacalao industry? What is it like to live in a boat like that, at sea for six months at a time?
France and the Mediterranean
From the familiar, murky green-gray waters of the Atlantic I entered Mediterranean zone: another world! The Mediterranean Sea is almost completely closed off from other large water bodies, which limits the amount of nutrients cycling in. This in turn limits plankton growth, keeping the waters crystal clear and making the it a highly oligotrophic marine ecosystem (oligotrophic = high oxygen, low nutrients). The sea is also highly biodiverse, and because it's so geographically closed off rates of endemism are around 28% (endemic species are geographically bound to one location, not found anywhere else). This is all great news for the coastal tourism industry, but unfortunately the Mediterranean is under extreme ecological duress from human activities along its densely populated coasts. Eutrophication, overfishing, and invasive species are the main threats to Mediterranean biodiversity.
While the Atlantic is home to enormous fishing trawlers that fill European supermarkets, the Mediterranean contains mostly small vessels (<12 meters long) and a large number of shellfish and finfish aquaculture operations. Notably, the number of women involved with large-scale fishing and aquaculture in the Mediterranean has increased in recent years due to the demand for labor, while the number of women in small-scale operations has declined due to general economic hardship in the sub-sector.
One interesting piece of French fisheries legislation is the spousal laws. Across Europe, the spouses of fisherfolk are typically not recognized by the law unless they are on the formal payroll of a company, even if they provide significant support to a family-run fishing business (this invisible labor often includes doing the books, fixing equipment, marketing and selling the catch, etc.). France is unique in that the national government specifically recognizes fisheries spouses and provides them with social protections including health care, maternity benefits, and retirement pensions. They also make a distinction between "associate spouses", “spouse partners” and “employee spouses”, depending on the division of labor within a family operation. I think this a step in the right direction, to create specificities in the law that formally recognize much of the fisheries labor that has been historically invisible. However, from my personal conversations with folks in France it seems that many people are unaware of this policy, and thus perhaps efficacy is a bit iffy.
My current monastic sejour
For the last two weeks (I leave today!), I have been living on Ile Saint-Honorat, an island off the South coast of France in the Alps-Maritimes region. In the 5th century Saint Honoratus of Arles founded the first monastery here, and despite some interruptions due to sacking, pillaging, and Spanish invasions it remained active until the French Revolution. Private monastic islands not being in fashion during that time of revolutionary turbulence, the land was converted into state property. A century later it was re-established as the Abbaye de Lérins, a Cistercian community of monks which still operates today making wine and herbal liquors. I have my own little bedroom, and I spend about ~5 hours a day working on various projects around the monastery’s woods, green spaces, and vegetable gardens with other volunteers. Not exactly a hotspot for women in fisheries, but I needed a bit of externally-imposed routine and space to reflect on the past six months and plan for the next.
A few final thoughts
Southern Europe is extremely beautiful and filled with trains, museums, cultural sites, and food that make it easy to traverse. The tourist path is so well-beaten that you can stumble into any random city with no plan and find a hostel to sleep in within 5 minutes. It’s funny now to think of myself in the weeks leading up to my departure last summer, lying in my bed with my eyes wide open, confronted by fearful visions of myself lost in strange cities across the world. In my imagination I would drag myself along the streets of an unfamiliar town at night, knocking on doors only to be turned away with a scoff and a slammed door. With each rejection the night would grow steadily colder, and panic would creep a little higher in my chest. Thankfully, this anxious nightmare has never happened. The reality is that if you have some money (an important caveat, thanks Watson foundation!) nothing is all that hard to find here.
In terms of my project however, I have run into a few difficulties finding parts of the European fisheries industry that I can observe in my capacity as a Watson fellow. In Barbados and Tanzania, all I had to do was walk in the direction of a fish market or pier to be immersed the world of fisheries going on all around me. I could watch fishermen unloading the day’s catch, people wielding knives to process them, and sellers hawking different species. Working waterfronts exist everywhere, but I have had a harder time accessing them in Europe.
The purpose of this blog is partly to send a proof of life to my family members, and partly to practice synthesizing ideas during my Watson experience. I find that periodically forcing myself to sit down and write in a more deliberate way helps me process all the disparate conversations and moments of learning that occur throughout my travels. It’s difficult to write with any sort of cohesive structure about two whole months at a time, so my new year’s resolution is to update this blog more frequently. Or at least to try.
A bientôt !
Grace
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