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There are more than 20,000 kinds of fish (most of them edible), as many as amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals put together. Next to cereals, fish are the most important food category in the world. And the Japanese are, per capita, the world's champion fish-eaters.
Ancient Assyrians were fish-keepers. In Imperial Rome, Cato the Elder
wondered if there could be a future for a country where a fish cost more than an ox (fresh fish had gotten very pricey, rather like a comparison in price between today's B*g M*c and an equivalent in weight of wild-caught smoked salmon...) The Hanseatic League, -the- trading and monetary powerhouse (think World Bank and British East India Company combined) of late medieval, early Renaissance Europe, came into existence because changes in currents shoved the herring of the North Sea into the Baltic, fisheries creating a base for economic and political power.
"The Perfect Storm" (1997), Sebastian Junger's smash hit, is a book largely about the dangerous lives and endangered livelihoods of Massachusetts fishermen and fisherwomen, family farmers of the Grand Banks. And, so we don't slight the beauties and virtues of freshwater fish and fishing, recall Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" (1976), a minor modern classic about families and angling.
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