I was in an upscale restaurant Sunday night and the waitress was giving the specials and she described the fish special as “water fish.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “What’s water fish?”

“Oh, that’s pollock. It’s a white fish, light, flaky….”

“From the Atlantic or Pacific?”

“Gee… I don’t know….”

For the record, pollock is not not an upscale fish. You know fishpaste? That’s pollock. The sad state of our oceans is such that this is what we are reduced to eating. And really, we shouldn’t be eating it, because we’re taking too many pollock from the seas.

A report in today’s New York Times says in the UK, cod is selling for 30 pounds a kilogram. There are 2.2 pounds to the kilogram and about two dollars to the pound, so cod is England is fetching about 30 bucks a pound. Cod. Thirty bucks a pound. The same fish that was the British poor man’s fish and chips or the working-class American’s Friday night fish fry.