Reality bites

I’m in the middle of Jacques-Yves Costeau’s The Silent World and I think I’m going to stop eating tuna for a while.

Costeau wrote with great economy. His style was vivid and colourful, not at all sparse or stark, but he managed to tell epic stories in a few paragraphs. I think it was because he had so much to tell, so many fantastic stories which somehow all had to be squeezed into a book (a relatively short one, at that), that he made them so short, but they’ve been compacted by the hand of a master storyteller. And bear in mind, this book was first published in 1953, only ten years after he and his friends Dumas and Taillez first used the aqualung.

A book that has a cheerier view of tuna sandwiches (you really have to read Costeau’s account of the Tunisian tuna fishery to understand why I’m put off all of a sudden) is Patty Wolcott’s aptly titled Tunafish Sandwiches. It’s a 10-word reader for very young children, but I liked its depiction of the marine food chain (“little little plants. little little animals. little little animals eat little little plants. little fish eat little little animals. big fish eat little fish.” and so forth) enough that I searched for and bought a copy on Amazon earlier this year. It also turned out that she wrote another of my childhood favourites, the Marvelous Mud Washing Machine.

I think I’ll stick to tilapia. They’re like the aquatic equivalent of cows. Herbivorous, domesticated, and nothing noble or terrible in death.