Eating the Ocean

"Elspeth Probyn wants to eat the ocean. I want to eat her book. It is one of the most profound works I have read on the sea, and the issues with which it presents us, in the 21st century, not least because it dares to digress and move into territories that other writers and academics have hitherto neglected."
-- Philip Hoare * Times Higher Education *
"Eloquently written, Probyn's vivid detail brings us along her journeys following (and eating many) oysters, swimming with tuna, covertly eating endangered bluefin tuna, and tracking the history of herring quines and women's roles in fishing. . . . I learned so much about the state of our oceans, where our seafood comes from, the danger in always choosing tuna and salmon, and the role of aquaculture (which provides more than half of all seafood consumed by humans!), but most importantly, I was encouraged to think differently about what 'sustainability' means, which I think is so important as a person who works in this sphere." -- Lisa Heinze * Sustainability with Style *
"From a policy perspective, where queer and poststructuralist feminisms are completely absent from the framework, Probyn's intervention is a much needed updating of sustainability discourses and food politics. As such, her account of herring wives and fish women is an important intervention into an environmental politics that either ignores women completely or that constructs them as virtuous consumers or vulnerable victims (105)." -- Reese Simpkins * Angelaki *
"Eating the Ocean is fascinating in its emphasis on the interconnections and mutual influences among humans, ocean creatures and the ocean itself." -- Carol J. Pierce Colfer * Agriculture and Human Values *
"This slender but ambitious volume offers an excellent overview and discussion of contemporary social science and humanities literature and theorising about the sea and human relations to it.... This is a useful contribution and a significantly better approach than some social science literature about the sea that uses it as a metaphor without proper material engagement." -- Penny McCall Howard * The Australian Journal of Anthropology *
"This book is like a breath of fresh sea air, cool, briny, and gently laced with the scent of dead things.... In my experience, students love to learn about seafood. And this book provides a unique, and exciting overview of the topic. Meanwhile, it makes meaningful change to the politics of human-fish relations, and of gender in the social sciences more generally. Readers may also find the book an accessible introduction to fisheries research in the humanities, and to more-than-human ethologies in the social sciences." -- L. G. Brown * FoodAnthropology *
"Eating the Ocean is a timely and masterfully judged intervention into debates in food studies." -- Laura Colebrooke * Cultural Geographies *
"Consistently thought-provoking. . . . Displaying a sophisticated grasp of recent developments in marine biology and drawing on a wide range of perspectives encompassing constructivism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and eco-feminism, Elspeth Probyn develops arguments that reveal the limitations of many simple prescriptions for managing human uses of marine resources and demonstrates the rewards to be derived from diving deeper into the complex forces that govern interactions between a variety of human actors and the physical and biological components of marine systems." -- Oran Young * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
"This is not a book to be skimmed. Readers will need to work their way through the various connections Probyn draws and think through how they feel about her assumptions. But they will be well rewarded for the time and thinking they invest. . . . Eating the Ocean offers a provocative perspective on how we consume the ocean and how we can do better." -- Patricia M. Clay * American Ethnologist *