Fishermen's life is not just a sea breeze, eat seafood, they also need to live, catch delicious fish is not willing to eat their own, more willing to take to the market to sell.

Fish has been the most important source of protein in Europe since the Middle Ages.

This is partly due to Europe's long coastline and navigational tradition.

On the other hand, it is also related to the ideological dominance of Catholicism since the early Middle Ages.

Catholicism, believed in by medieval Europeans, had certain taboos on certain types of diet at certain times to verify the loyalty of believers.

For example, in the Catholic faith, believers have a 40-day fasting period before Easter every year.

During Lent, believers could not eat red meat (warm-blooded animals).

That is, the meat of most mammals (beaver meat could be eaten because Europeans at that time regarded beavers as fish) except rough black bread made from barley and oatmeal.

Because red meat represents "sexual heat", desire and other bad things in the Catholic faith, and believers are required to abstinence during religious fasting, so they can't eat it.

But this conflicts with the physiological needs of human beings, because human beings need to eat enough protein to be healthy.

But although Catholics cannot eat red meat, they represent "cold"white meat".

That is, the meat of aquatic animals (mainly fish) is not on the taboo diet during Lent, and the church does not object to believers eating animals that live in water.

Because the meat of these animals is "cold". It doesn't trigger desire.

Therefore, during the long fasting period of Catholics every year, even if many Europeans no longer like fish.

In order not to violate religious taboos, they can only use fish as their main source of protein, so fish is a very important and popular food in Europe.

European fishermen will tie many hooks to a long line, then hang the bait and throw it out to the side of the ship.

So that as long as they wait a short period of time, when the fishermen pull the line into the boat, they can harvest a lot of cod, which is easy to operate.

The cod caught by these fishing boats have become an important source of calories and protein in Europe after being dried or salted.

Cod contains only 3% oil and 18% protein, which is much higher than ordinary fish.

But when cod is dried, more than 80% of the water is evaporated, leaving only concentrated protein, almost 80%.

Therefore, for Europeans at that time, fish was an indispensable food on the table.