Jon Taylor, Fried Eggs & Fish Scales

Well, now I've got complicated feelings I didn't want (and don't want to have to deal with) about Jon Taylor's memoir-ish book from Harbour Publishing Fried Eggs & Fish Scales: Tales from a Sointula Troller.

It's local history, it's small-town memoir, it's from someone who's spent whole decades on fishboats on BC's coast, and so it's exactly the kind of book I'd be tempted to pick up. Indeed, that's just why I ended up with Fried Eggs & Fish Scales in the first place.

And it's fine, in all the ways you'd expect. I've read all Joe Garner's similar books, and this does much the same job. The book's chapters are humorously told tales about humorous individuals and situations, for the most part, with some useful historical context. If you're going to live somewhere, you should know something about its history and its people, especially the people you're not going to run into and whose lives are part of the place's core fabric. In that sense, books like Fried Eggs & Fish Scales are irreplaceable for BC residents, whatever the weaknesses or failings of such books might be.

So far, so good. I don't know that I needed this many examples of terrible ecological behaviour from commercial fishers, among other things, but like I've said about Garner and the logging industry, these things are worth knowing, so I'm glad someone's saying them.

And yet as I say, complicated feelings.

This has been precipitated by one passage in particular, to which I've already committed way too much time: "The salmon were so thick that the department of fisheries had to hire boats to seine them up, kill them and dump them back into the sea, to prevent them from plugging the spawning grounds. Electric fences had to be put across the rivers and millions of sockeye bulldozed out of the river and hauled to dump sites. One year alone, twenty-two million sockeye, worth twenty dollars each, were dredged out of the rivers and buried—while the central coast fishermen starved" (p168). 

This is ... well. I'd be interested in any kind of source related to these claims, but I would note that in 2024 the total estimated sockeye run for the Fraser River was around seven million fish. He's alleging that in a single year, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans managed to secretly kill three times that many sockeye, and then to dispose of them without anyone noticing. That's ... well.

And yet I feel like these claims must be tied to something, somewhere, even if they sound intensely conspiracy-like, utterly implausible, and libelous, so I've dug in.

Web searches without "AI" (fuck AI!) turned up nothing remotely relevant. Searching through academic research databases didn't help, either, and while I still might reach out to colleagues who work in marine biology, I don't want them wasting time on what I'm convinced is a conspiracy theory.

When I used Google as a last resort, their "AI Overview" (fuck AI! Seriously) said quite categorically yesterday that nobody uses electric fences to kill salmon; today it says only that there's "no widespread evidence of electric fences being used to intentionally kill salmon in BC rivers." I worry that the change is probably because I asked the question from two different browsers while not logged in, so I've single-handedly manifested A Trend.

Still, LLM-style AI does nothing more than create plausible-sounding strings of words, so an AI Overview is always bullshit. More than that, it's also bullshit that companies like Google won't let you opt out of having the plagiarism machine tag along while you try to bash some sense out of the corporate-smashed ruins of the formerly useful internet. These results ("results") prove nothing, in other words, except that I'm right to never use Google.

I asked Harbour whether their editing process had looked at this, but I don't expect to hear back. While it's tempting to reach out to folks I know at DFO or at DFO-adjacent organizations, I don't want to give these claims oxygen, and frankly I'm tempted just to pull this post altogether.

Anyway. Complicated feelings.

Fried Eggs & Fish Scales is exactly the kind of book I want to be able to recommend, because its stories are about BC's margins, margins whose stories and people are generally kept out of BC's mythology. With this kind of suspect material wrapped around those stories, though, I cannot recommend this book.

But change my mind! Confirm Taylor's claims about DFO, dead sockeye, electric fences, and bulldozers, and absolutely I'll reconsider.

At this point, unfortunately, my strongest feeling is simply that this book needed a different Harbour editor, at minimum. I worry that the current iteration of Harbour Publishing maybe doesn't deserve the trust I've always put in them.