Opinion | Teach kids to fish, but don't make them eat it - TheSpec.com

There is a reason little kids love fishing, but will usually refuse to eat what they catch. My father is a very good illustration of why.

Like many children, my sister Gilly and I would fish whenever we could. Off the dock, out in the old creaky rowboat, anywhere we thought there might be fish. By the time we were a certain age, dad said you didn’t fish if you didn’t bait your own hook. We’d do the usual kid thing of gently tying a worm around the hook and losing dozens before finally figuring it out. We’d swing anything we caught to my dad to set free. By another certain age, we had to do this part, too, and send the little fish back into the lake.

Unless we caught a big one.

Dad would hear us screaming with excitement and thunder down to the lake to take charge. His strategy was a chaotic bridge between wanting us to learn how to land a big bass and desperate to make sure we didn’t lose it. He’d usually — finally — just grab the rod as we stood ready with a landing net. Mice used to eat holes in the landing net each winter, a fact we usually discovered at this very moment.

There would be a big production with him announcing there would be fish for dinner, and mom plastering a desperate smile on her face that looked like she’d just smelled a fart. “Fish for dinner” was the beginning of a terrible thing, and we all knew it.

Dad would clean the fish, and I would help. Gilly would leave because it was gross, but at 8 or 9, I was fully in the camp of the more gross, the better. One time we found a live crayfish inside the stomach of a bass we were cleaning, and I believed we should call Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom because we’d just witnessed a food chain miracle. Dad tossed the crayfish back in the lake where it was promptly eaten by another fish.

My mother was British, so the only fish she truly liked was fish and chips. The grey thing lying in the pan was decidedly not fish and chips, and we didn’t want to eat it. Dad would demand we try it, and we’d cry and pick bits of bones from between our teeth. I think my mom used our behaviour as a diversion to cram her own serving into a napkin. My father saw food as a challenge to be won: week-old rye bread was good for your teeth, acidic sauerkraut would toughen you up, and eating bass meant you really loved the cottage.

Dinnertime tears were real in our family.

My father didn’t know how to fillet a fish. My Uncle Gale did, and when he and my Aunt Kay came to the cottage, Gale would fish properly and catch a string of bass. He would also clean them like an expert and Kay had a beer batter she made so it tasted far more like fish and chips. We would eat it. Gale offered to show dad how to fillet but even though Gale was my father’s best friend, dad proved it was a lesser skill by refusing to learn.

Gale also offered to put a real bathroom in the cottage — we had an outhouse at the time — but dad stood his ground and said he didn’t need any help. We kids put in the bathroom a decade later.

Dad finally gave up making us eat fish. If he caught one, he’d cook and eat it himself while we ate grilled cheese sandwiches.

We also got a lot smarter when fishing. We’d catch a big one, but shut up and set it free.

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Opinion | Teach kids to fish, but don't make them eat it - TheSpec.com
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