Boston - Home of the Bean and the Cod - Faces Cultural Crisis as Cod Disappear
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [USA Today] by Rick Hamson April 17, 2015
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod.
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
--"Boston Toast," by John Collins Bossidy
The home of the bean and the cod is running out of the latter, a crisis that could ruin the state's fishermen, imperil its sacred symbol and take the "cod" out of "scrod."
Cod once was king in these waters, so plentiful that it drew fishing ships from across the sea. John Winthrop, a founder of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote that when he and his fellow Puritans arrived in 1630, in just a few hours, they fish-hooked 67 cod.
Soon, the fish was an economic mainstay. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, "Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod...
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