The Culinary Economics of Seafood: Cold Water and the Norwegian Diet

Cold water is more productive than warm water. This is a fact of marine ecology with profound consequences for the countries that border the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea. Cold seawater holds more dissolved oxygen and more dissolved nutrients than warm water. Where cold water upwells from the deep — as it does along Norway's coast, driven by currents, winds and the topography of the seabed — it brings with it the minerals and organic compounds that support dense populations of plankton, which support dense populations of small fish, which support dense populations of larger fish and marine mammals. The result is some of the most productive fishing grounds in the world lying immediately off the Norwegian coast.

Herring: The Historical Foundation

For most of Norwegian history, the fish that mattered most was not the cod — dominant as cod was in the export trade — but the Atlantic herring. Herring arrived in vast shoals along the Norwegian coast in patterns that were unpredictable in the short term but reliable in aggregate, and the communities that could harvest and preserve them at scale had access to a protein source of extraordinary abundance. Herring was eaten fresh in summer, salted in barrels for winter, smoked over wood fires and rendered into oil used for everything from lamp fuel to leather preservation.

The economics of herring fishing shaped Norwegian coastal society. The appearance of a large herring shoal was an event that mobilised entire communities and generated intense commercial activity — fish buyers, barrel makers, salt merchants and boat builders all depended on the herring season. The disappearance of herring from an area — which happened periodically when the shoals shifted their routes — could devastate a coastal economy as completely as any other natural disaster. The Norwegian herring fishery collapsed dramatically in the late 1960s due to overfishing, an event that prompted Norway's subsequent strong commitment to fisheries management and sustainable catch quotas.

Cod: The Export Commodity

Atlantic cod is among the most important food fish in the history of Western civilisation. The enormous spawning aggregations that gathered each winter off the Lofoten Islands — where Arctic cod migrated south from the Barents Sea to spawn in the relatively warmer waters — attracted Norwegian fishermen for centuries and produced quantities of fish that, dried or salted, could be traded throughout Europe and beyond. The Hanseatic League, which dominated North European trade from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, made Norwegian stockfish one of its primary commodities, distributing it from Bergen — where Hanseatic merchants maintained a trading post for four hundred years — to markets in Germany, the Low Countries, England and southern Europe.

The relationship between cod and Norwegian identity is not merely economic. The fish appears in place names, in folk sayings, in the design of buildings and in the collections of the country's museums. The annual Lofoten fishing season was for centuries the single most significant economic event in Norwegian coastal life, drawing thousands of fishermen from across the country to the islands each winter. Its cultural residue persists in Norwegian cuisine, where dried and salted cod in various forms remain present in a way that speaks to their former centrality.

Salmon: The Modern Chapter

The most significant development in Norwegian seafood in the modern era is one that has no historical precedent: the rise of salmon aquaculture. Atlantic salmon had always been present in Norwegian rivers, and wild salmon was a valued food, but the quantities available from wild fisheries were modest. The development of commercial salmon farming in Norwegian fjords, beginning in the 1970s and growing explosively through the 1980s and 1990s, transformed Norway into the world's largest producer of Atlantic salmon by a wide margin. Norwegian farmed salmon is today present in markets and restaurants across the globe — a product with a specifically Norwegian geographic identity that has become one of the most widely consumed fish in the world.

The growth of salmon aquaculture has also been accompanied by significant environmental controversy: concerns about sea lice, escapes of farmed fish into wild salmon rivers, the use of wild fish as feed, and the impact of fish farm effluent on local marine ecosystems. The Norwegian aquaculture industry has invested heavily in technologies to address these issues, and the regulatory framework governing the sector is among the most stringent in the world, but the tension between the economic importance of salmon farming and its environmental impacts remains a live issue in Norwegian public debate.

Today Norway is the world's second largest exporter of seafood by value, behind China. The cold waters of the Norwegian coast — the same waters that shaped the traditional diet of coastal communities centuries ago — continue to be the foundation of a global food industry, albeit one that looks very different from the salting sheds and drying racks of the historical fishery.