Fish of identity and memory

Some foods nourish the body. Others nourish memory. Fish—especially the fish we grow up with—often do both at once. Across the world, certain fish become inseparable from identity, carrying the weight of childhood, place, language, and belonging. They are not always the most elegant or convenient foods. Many are bony, oily, difficult to prepare, or hard to find once you leave home. That difficulty is part of their meaning. To crave a particular fish is often to crave a version of yourself that existed somewhere else. 

 Learning a fish is learning a place

In the Philippines, milkfish—bangus—is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is the national fish, served fried, grilled, stewed, or stuffed, yet it is also notoriously full of fine bones. 

Children learn early how to eat it: where to slow down, how to feel with the tongue, how to separate danger from nourishment. This knowledge is bodily, not written. You learn it at the table, under supervision, with reminders and corrections. 

For Filipinos who leave, milkfish becomes difficult to replace. Even when it is available abroad, it is never quite the same. To eat bangus again is not only to taste something familiar—it is to remember how to be careful in a very specific way, how to eat as you once did, surrounded by people who knew the same rules without explaining them. The fish becomes a test of belonging. If you know how to eat it, you are from here. 

Fish that carry language 

In many cultures, fish are bound tightly to language and naming. In Japan, eel (unagi) is eaten during the hottest days of summer to restore strength. The tradition is so familiar that the word itself carries seasonal meaning. To say “unagi” is to invoke heat, fatigue, perseverance, and an old rhythm of the calendar.

 For Japanese people living abroad, eating eel can feel like touching a linguistic memory.

 The taste is inseparable from words, from advertisements, from childhood meals that came with explanations you no longer hear spoken daily. When the language thins, food thickens it. 

In Ashkenazi Jewish communities, carp appears as gefilte fish, a dish shaped as much by religious law as by migration and necessity. Ground, sweetened, and served cold, gefilte fish often provokes strong reactions—especially from younger generations. Yet for many families, it is inseparable from Sabbath, from grandparents, from a world carried across borders. Disliking the dish does not erase its meaning. Sometimes resistance is itself a form of memory. 

The fish you miss before you miss anything else

Migrants often report missing fish before they miss monuments or landscapes. Fish is immediate. It is daily. It is what your hands know how to cook without thinking.

 In the Mediterranean, anchovies and sardines are eaten fresh, quickly, often outdoors. They spoil fast. They demand presence. For people who move away, the absence of these fish is the absence of spontaneity—the loss of meals that happen without planning, without recipes, without ceremony. 

In Northern Europe, smoked fish carries a different kind of memory. It lasts. It waits. Smoked eel, herring, or salmon often appears at holidays, when families gather after long separations. These fish are associated with endurance—not just of the food, but of relationships stretched across time. You don’t eat them alone. You eat them when everyone is finally back. 

 Fish as emotional geography 

 Some fish anchor people to waters that may no longer exist as they once did. Indigenous communities whose rivers have been dammed or polluted speak of fish as memory keepers. When salmon or eel disappear, it is not just a protein source that vanishes, but a way of understanding the land. Fish remember paths that humans forget. They carry maps in their bodies. When they fail to return, it feels like a kind of erasure. Even in urban contexts, this loss is felt. 

In London, jellied eels were once a staple of working-class food culture. As eel populations declined and tastes changed, the dish faded. What disappeared with it was not just a meal, but a local identity tied to the Thames, to labor, to survival in difficult conditions. Food memory is often ecological memory, whether we acknowledge it or not. 

 The body remembers what the mind forgets

What makes fish such a powerful vessel for identity is how deeply physical the knowledge is. You remember how to clean it, how to debone it, how to smell when it’s fresh or turning. These skills live in the hands and mouth more than in the mind. Even after years away, people often find they can still eat their childhood fish “correctly” without thinking. The body remembers what the mind has stopped rehearsing. This is why fish foods are so emotionally charged. They bypass narrative and go straight to sensation. A smell, a texture, a small danger—these unlock memories faster than stories do. 

When identity becomes fragile

 As global supply chains expand, many fish are now available everywhere, all the time. Paradoxically, this can thin their meaning. When fish lose their seasonality, their difficulty, their connection to place, they risk becoming generic. At the same time, climate change and overfishing are making some culturally significant fish harder to access for the communities that built identities around them. The result is a strange inversion: fish become more available to outsiders and less available to those for whom they matter most. Identity, like ecology, turns out to be fragile.


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