Fish trading??
- Thread starter bardolph
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None_Existant
Chieftain
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- Feb 8, 2007
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No. Its reasonable to think that fishermen sold their fish to people or shipped them to other towns for money. Fish has nutrients and would, yes, at least augument the health of people who eat it. Of course, one might reason that eating fish isnt required for living. Well neither is that extra health point 
bardolph
King
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Yeah but those fish would be pretty stinky by the time they reached that other city! I don't think *I* would eat a fish that's been sitting in someones wagon for 2 weeks!No. Its reasonable to think that fishermen sold their fish to people or shipped them to other towns for money. Fish has nutrients and would, yes, at least augument the health of people who eat it. Of course, one might reason that eating fish isnt required for living. Well neither is that extra health point
None_Existant
Chieftain
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- Feb 8, 2007
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Thats because you live in the modern age. We have refrigeration and stuff and thats gotten us to comfy. A person back then would simply have delt with it. After all, many sailors well into the renassiance ate hard biscuts with worms and drank yellow water. One last thing, salt helps preserve food and they were used to disguise flavor, along with other spices, of spoiled food. Which people ate.
Lockesdonkey
Liberal Jihadist
Beyond that, fish caught on the coast would not be sold fresh inland. Rather, it would be dried, salted, or smoked, to preserve the stuff. In addition, a great deal of fish made its way to urban centers not as fish but as fish sauce, such as the famous Roman garum--the sauce they made in Spain was in high demand in the city of Rome itself.
You don't need refrigeration in order to preserve foods, mankind has had other ways of doing that in the past. You can smoke it, dry it out, put it in salt or vinegar, or simply cook it up beforehand. It's only raw fish that tends to go bad quickly, other ways of preparing it can keep it reasonably edible for quite some time.
You should try pickled herring sometime, it tastes great! Quite popular with the Dutch.
Carl v.
Chieftain
It is not reasonable to assume that saltwater fish were shipped to inland cities to improve the health of the population. But from medieval times, enormous quantities of fish from saltwater fisheries have been shipped inland to feed people for religious reasons. If the health of the inlanders was improved by eating this fish, it was probably just a spin-off.
In European waters, so to speak, this occurred because the Catholics were not allowed to eat flesh on certain occasions. On the brim of the Arctic Sea, there are some small archipelagos around witch an enormous seasonal fishery has taken place for the last few thousand years. The catch, cod, was dried and exported to the Catholic areas of Europe.
This trade was driven by the German Hansabund, and was a significant, if not the main, contribution to the wealth and power of free cities like Rostock, Lübeck, Hamburg and so on.
In one of his books, the German 19. century adventurer Paul Güssler even mentions he has been served dried fish from the northern archipelagos inland in what today is known as Cameroon.
In European waters, so to speak, this occurred because the Catholics were not allowed to eat flesh on certain occasions. On the brim of the Arctic Sea, there are some small archipelagos around witch an enormous seasonal fishery has taken place for the last few thousand years. The catch, cod, was dried and exported to the Catholic areas of Europe.
This trade was driven by the German Hansabund, and was a significant, if not the main, contribution to the wealth and power of free cities like Rostock, Lübeck, Hamburg and so on.
In one of his books, the German 19. century adventurer Paul Güssler even mentions he has been served dried fish from the northern archipelagos inland in what today is known as Cameroon.
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