White bread has also been commonly used as a hook-bait for centuries and is even referenced in the fisherman’s Bible The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton in 1653.

It’s well known that successive generations of anglers have lowered their expectations over the outdoor experience and game fish in general. As our beloved quarry is diminished in both size and numbers, we’ve been forced to ignore those qualities that made them great, and widen the available prey by adding the less genteel and outright untouchable into the game fish ranks.

Magazines that once talked about fish as, “…like a startled silvery gazelle, spinning in midair …” now rarely mention anything other than “wallow” , “snag” or “slugfest.”

With dams as plentiful as instream cobble, our once agile opponent has become some panting porcine slob that comes to heel when we whistle, disgorges its most recent meal into our palm from overexertion, poses for the camera in familiar “Gasping Fatty” cover pose, and must be coaxed back into the water. A far cry from our father’s “silvery greyhound – product of thousands of generations fighting miles of uphill currents.“

Sure it’s our doing. Ensuring the genetics of those lean and muscular fish are no longer viable, via selection for fish small enough to negotiate a live turbine – or fat enough to maintain their place without swimming.

Reducing our beloved sport to releasing some bloated softbody that eats your fly hoping you’ll shove its flaccid ass a bit further upstream, clearing some shallow spot blocking its next meal ..

The Bad News is that in addition to selecting fish whose belly drips through all but clenched fingers, you’ve  imprinted your eating habits on young and impressionable game fish, whose biopsies suggest that Type II Diabetes in fresh and salt water fish roughly mirrors the human populations nearby.

… your midday meal being such a nutritional wasteland that it’s a toss up whether your lunch provides the bare necessities to keep you alive – or whether your wife packed it with every intention of killing you dead.

If you had any sense, the thought should give them jaws pause. If the fish shouldn’t eat it there’s little doubt that you’re destined for a fiber-less haymaker delivered to the knotted remnants of your colon.

Hard to believe that in a couple hundred short years, we’ve destroyed most of the known fisheries, and corrupted even the bait used to tame all that Wilderness.