Journalist Richard Schweid first learned the strange facts of the freshwater eel's life from a fisherman in a small Spanish town just south of Valencia. "The eeler who explained the animal's life cycle to me did so as he served up an eel he had just taken from a trap, killed, cleaned, and cooked in olive oil in an earthenware dish," writes Schweid. "I ate it with a chunk of fresh, crusty bread. It was delicious. I was immediately fascinated." As this engaging culinary and natural history reveals, the humble eel is indeed an amazing creature. Every European and American eel begins its life in the Sargasso Sea--a vast, weedy stretch of deep Atlantic waters between Bermuda and the Azores. Larval eels drift for up to three years until they reach the rivers of North America or Europe, where they mature and live as long as two decades before returning to the Sargasso to mate and die. Eels have never been bred successfully in captivity. Consulting fisherfolk, cooks, and scientists, Schweid takes the reader on a global tour to reveal the economic and gastronomic importance of eel in places such as eastern North Carolina, Spain, Northern Ireland, England, and Japan. (While this rich yet mild-tasting fish has virtually disappeared from U.S. tables, over $2 billion worth of eel is still eagerly consumed in Europe and Asia each year.) The book also includes recipes, both historic and contemporary, for preparing eel.

The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson, first published in 1999, became, almost overnight, an immense success, winning prizes and accolades around the world. Its combination of serious food history, culinary expertise, and entertaining serendipity, with each page offering an infinity of perspectives, was recognized as unique. The study of food and food history is a new discipline, but one that has developed exponentially in the last twenty years. There are now university departments, international societies, learned journals, and a wide-ranging literature exploring the meaning of food in the daily lives of people around the world, and seeking to introduce food and the process of nourishment into our understanding of almost every compartment of human life, whether politics, high culture, street life, agriculture, or life and death issues such as conflict and war. The great quality of this Companion is the way it includes both an exhaustive catalogue of the foods that nourish humankind - whether they be fruit from tropical forests, mosses scraped from adamantine granite in Siberian wastes, or body parts such as eyeballs and testicles - and a richly allusive commentary on the culture of food, whether expressed in literature and cookery books, or as dishes peculiar to a country or community. The new edition has not sought to dim the brilliance of Davidson's prose. Rather, it has updated to keep ahead of a fast-moving area, and has taken the opportunity to alert readers to new avenues in food studies.

The freshwater eels, the Anguillids, have increasingly become the focus of attention for fisheries managers, scientists, researchers, policy makers, conservation bodies and other stakeholders. These species can be seen as a bellwether for issues affecting aquatic ecosystems – their steep decline and the management initiatives to try and reverse this trend, touch on subjects as diverse as disconnected waterways, loss of habitat, novel parasites, pollution, over-fishing and climate change. There are some 16 species of the Anguilla genus and all exhibit similar lifestyles, growing in waters often far-removed from their marine spawning grounds. These enigmatic, contradictory and confounding species share similar challenges and pressures wherever they are found. This book was generated from the 1st UK International Eel Science Symposium which was held at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in June 2017. Hosted by the Institute of Fisheries Management (IFM), the ZSL, and the Environment Agency (EA), the Symposium was heralded as a success, with over 180 delegates in attendance. Many of the world’s top eel specialists attended or gave presentations across a diverse range of subjects. This was one of the Symposium’s, and now the book’s great strengths – its diversity of subjects and authors. Many countries are represented within the book, from across Europe and as far afield as New Zealand, South Africa, Vanuatu, French Polynesia, Japan, Canada and the USA. The EA and IFM have collaborated to produce this landmark book which includes a mix of cultural, scientific and management information which will be invaluable to anyone with a professional or personal interest in these mysterious fish, including ichthyologists, fisheries scientists and managers, aquaculture personnel, environmental biologists and ecologists, marine and freshwater biologists, vertebrate zoologists, animal behaviourists and students studying in all these areas. Libraries in all universities and research establishments where these subjects are studied and taught should have copies on their shelves. 5m Books

"The aim of this report is to define and review this "semi-aquaculture practice", which has been more accurately named "capture-based aquaculture." -- Preface.