Why Kids Don’t Know Their Plaice at the Table

Reading about Britain’s attempt to reach a trade deal with Canada, I was surprised to learn that the two countries exported precisely the same number, or tonnage, of pigs to each other. I can’t remember now whether it was 300 or 300,000,000, but the whole trade struck me as bizarre, given the precise equality of the exchange, a secret means of keeping people busy, perhaps, who might otherwise have nothing to do. Can the pigs of the two sides of the Atlantic really be so very different, as say a guinea fowl is from a herring, that it is necessary to go to the trouble to transport tons of carcasses—I assume that they are slaughtered in their respective countries—across thousands of miles of ocean? Not being an economist, I must be missing something.

There have been stories too of late (since Brexit, in fact) of British-caught fish rotting in fishing ports because the European Union will not allow them to be landed on its shores. Suddenly they have become toxic or unsafe for…