Seafood variety in 1,192 Good Housekeeping recipes narrowed toward five species over a century

Thurstan collated 1,192 recipes ^[2] from selected issues of the magazine ^[1]. Over a century that averages about 119 recipes a decade ^[8], so any single decade's share rests on a modest count.

Two shares in the coverage are easy to merge, and they should stay apart. From the 1980s the big five appeared in well over half of recipes ^[4]. Separately, the same five species make up about 80% of seafood eaten in the UK ^[12]. One is a share of recipes in a single magazine and the other is a share of consumption, so the first cannot be converted into the second.

Thurstan is direct about the limit. "Recipes are not a direct measure of consumption or preference, but they show what people were expected to recognize, access and want to cook at a given time," she said ^[5]. She also scopes the finding to her source: the shift reflects "a genuine narrowing of what readers were being shown and encouraged to cook, at least within the pages of this magazine," she said ^[6].

The recipes cannot show whether the magazine followed supply or helped steer it. In our view a recipe archive can date a narrowing and show what changed around it, but it cannot order cause and effect. Thurstan's own account puts the weight on supply: the shift reflects "decades of interacting changes in fish supply, trade and supply chains," she said ^[10].