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Summer 2008: I take a carry on-only WizzAir flight to Kristiansand, a city of just under 79,000 people on Norway’s southeastern coast. A friend of mine from graduate school, M., and his partner, H., along with their newborn son and several friends, are staying on the island of Skarpøy, about 15 minutes from here by boat. H.’s family has a cottage there; they’ve invited me to stay for a weekend; flights are cheap; how can I say no?
When I land, I take a bus from the airport to the shoreline, where M. and friends pick me up in a small speedboat. On our way to the cottage, we pause in the water to catch some mackerel. I lay back in the sun, resting an arm on my small backpack, and watch the surface of the water catch the light as these handsome men reel in a few small fish, just enough to bait the crab traps with when we get back. I point to a cliff that has a Norwegian flag painted on the rocks. “So the Danish king knew where he was,” one of the men says, winking.
The next time we take the boat out, I come along and dive underwater to harvest mussels from the nearby cliffs. M. gives me a short tutorial with the snorkel and shows me how to know when they’re ready: when the shells detach easily, requiring no more than the gentlest tug on the byssal threads that anchor their feet to the rocks. I am alive with wonder at the ease of this harvest; like a true American, I get excited about the bounty and begin to harvest extra when M. signals to me under the water that we have enough for now. Enough. That’s all you take; that’s how there’s always enough for you, for everyone.
Later we eat a marvelous seafood stew with the crab and mussels in a bright broth. While I’d been out with the boys, the women had harvested raspberries and churned them into an ice cream, and made a gooseberry pie. After dinner, I go with the boys to a bonfire, then to a small interior room barely big enough for us all, where we drink both bottles of the bison grass vodka I’ve brought in my backpack from Poland. We sing and pal around, just like M. and I did all through graduate school, like gender doesn’t matter, like I don’t have to be a girl, or at least that this doesn’t mean the same thing here. I don’t have to be pretty or skinny or know how to cook. I can be loud and brash and laugh with my whole belly.
Eventually, sloshed, I curl up on a bunk and sink toward sleep while they all carry on singing and joking in a blend of languages that turns away from English and toward Norwegian now that I’m gently detaching from the party, from the day, from my consciousness.
I think to myself: How exquisite it is to eat food you harvested yourself, to be invited into someone else’s world and treated like you belong. How excellent it is to be drunk and surrounded by men with no fear for my own safety. What an extraordinary, beautiful place. What a brand-new way of understanding food, and consumption, and gender, and everything else. My heart and belly are full in the best possible way. Enough. It’s exactly enough.
Seafood – including the small fish such as mackerel, sardines, and anchovies that seem to define the current tinned fish renaissance – has nourished indigenous peoples in coastal areas since time immemorial. People practiced various preservation methods throughout history, including drying, salting, smoking, pickling, and fermentation. These resulting products could be traded or kept throughout the year, to eat when fresh fish were less plentiful — or simply to flavor other dishes.
Canning, as a method of preservation, is relatively new. It dates back to the early 1800’s, when a French innovator submitted his method for a prize offered by the French government (under Napoleon), which was in search of ways to ship food to its troops. Its very first use was to preserve fish – first in glass, later in tin for ease of transport. As this technology became widespread, tinned and canned fish exploded in popularity around the world. By the end of the century there were canning facilities in France, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Algeria, Latvia, Morocco, Norway, the United States, and Japan, and possibly others. Today, you can find fish canned from Finland to Nigeria.
In the United States, industrial canning began with oysters as early as 1819 and ramped up during the Civil War. By the late 19th century, the U.S. fish canning industry was growing rapidly, relying heavily on immigrant labor from Asia – first, from China, then, after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, workers from Japan and the Philippines.
The first sardine canning factory in the USA was established in 1896 in San Pedro, California, to take advantage of the sardine population in the Monterey Bay, which thrives due to nutrient rich upwellings of ocean water that occur because of the underwater topography. Ten miles to the east and twelve years later, the first sardine cannery is established in Monterey, in the area that will eventually become known as Cannery Row and made famous by John Steinbeck. The industry really takes off during World War I, when production grows from 75,000 cases of sardines per year to, by 1918, 1.4 million. The industry survives the lull of the Depression only to explode again during World War II.
Monterey Bay had been a seemingly bottomless bowl of fresh sardines, but by 1945, the industry has so completely decimated the sardine population in the Bay that there is nothing left to fish.
Greed, from grædig, from grēdags, meaning hungry. But not hungry like tongue-unanchored, mouth-tingling, belly-rumbling, head-light, blood-thin, mood-night, trouble-standing hungry.
Hungry like, it’s never enough.
Hungry like, this won’t last forever, even though the reason it won’t last forever is because we’re depleting it right now.
Hungry like, we don’t quite believe there’s enough for us all.
I’ve tried to figure out how it is that tinned fish began trending among the white and wealthy in the United States. Many people attribute their rise in popularity to cookbook author Alison Roman, who featured anchovies and sardines in her popular writing for NYT Cooking and The New York Times, turning tiny fish into culinary superstars perfectly suited for pandemic kitchens. Others credit TikTok, where many people collectively declared in 2021 that tinned fish was “hot girl food.” Maybe it’s because of people traveling to Portugal, where tinned fish (conservas), long a part of the region’s culinary culture, was rapidly becoming highbrow as far back as 2017. (The social media-ready packaging probably also helped.)
In my initial research, every article about the “rise of tinned fish” focused on easy explanations that sound like marketing-speak: It’s high-protein! It’s good for you! It’s umami! You can eat it on the beach, right out of the can, with only a baguette to spread it on! It’s sustainable! It cures cancer! And most importantly, there’s lots — lots — of it in the seas!
The deeper I went, the more this narrative felt flat, one-dimensional, even a little manufactured. Despite the fact that all those attributes are real (with the exception of curing cancer), tinned fish is a food that usually has to be pushed on people who would rather eat something else. Because it is a relatively cheap source of satiating proteins, it’s often been seen as a convenient, portable solution for hunger and nutrition, with more focus on that than on taste.
Soviet leaders explicitly invested in the industry for this reason, seeking to cheaply and predictably feed their entire empire. In the Soviet Union, it was not uncommon to see canned sprats, gobies, crab, whale, and even sea cucumber. The Soviet Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography developed a salty paste from krill that was supposedly similar to a shrimp paste, whose production coincided with an expansion of Soviet krill harvesting in Antarctica. Just like in France under Napoleon, there was very much an alignment of government interests and the canning of seafood.
Today, in the United States and elsewhere, tinned fish are being pushed hard by a new group of entrepreneurs, most of them upscale, who laud their umami flavors and sell them at price points that sometimes exceed my hourly wage for a 4 oz. tin.
Some of the founders, like the couple behind UK’s Sea Sisters, which began in London in 2020, have a background in food production. Others, like LA-based Fishwife, which also started in 2020, had no prior food experience. Instead, the founders used their access to venture capital and marketing background to build their business from the top down. Portland-based Tiny Fish Co. launched just last year, helmed by Sarah Hauman, a local celebrity chef.
In the decade prior to the pandemic, a number of companies got into the U.S. tinned fish market. Patagonia Provisions started marketing its tinned fish as outdoor adventure food in 2012. French company La Bonne Mer started in 2016. Matiz was created as a brand by a larger company in 2015, and redesigned its packaging in 2021 to be competitive in a market where packaging matters.
In other words, the explosion of tinned fish in upscale U.S. markets does seem very much the product of a trend, not unlike the upwelling of ocean waters that creates fertile environments for the fish themselves. At our tiny farm store, we stock 30 separate tinned seafood products from 6 different brands. Most of these are sardines, but there’s also mackerel, anchovies, tuna, cod, mussels, rockfish, octopus, and even geoduck, ranging in price from $4.50 a tin for Matiz sardines to $16 a can for the Tiny Fish Co. geoduck in black pepper.
Most of these tins have bright, playful packaging with illustrations ranging from the representative to the wacky (women with cartoonishly voluptuous figures in tiny clothes, cigar-smoking fat cats with hairy chests in pinstripe suits) to the adorably imaginative (Tiny Fish Co’s sea creatures look almost too cute to eat). This, too, tracks with history — at the last peak of the seafood canning industry in Europe 100 years ago, packaging was the main differentiator. That, and novelty: Demand was so high that companies were able to explore a wide variety of experimental products, from pickled sturgeon to shark — foods that are still uncommon outside of places where they’re part of local history and culture.
But the bulk of tinned fish production around the world isn’t coming from boutique startups led by celebrity chefs or charismatic young entrepreneurs. At a grocery store or gas station, you’re more likely to see brands owned by companies like the Thai Union Group, which owns Chicken of the Sea and King Oscar; Bumble Bee Foods, which also runs the brands Beach Cliff, Snow’s, and Brunswick; or StarKist, famous for tuna, which got into the sardines market in 2013. At an international grocery, you’ll probably see more Russian and Eastern European brands with a focus on small fish like herring and sprats, including Bandi Foods (multiple brands, mostly originating in Lithuania and Ukraine) and Riga Gold (out of Latvia), as well as many brands coming out of East and Southeast Asia, including Taiwan’s Old Fisherman and How Mama brands; China’s Eagle Coin, famous for its tinned fried dace with salted black beans; Japan’s Nissui; Thailand’s Three Lady Cooks; and many others. You can buy Tunisian sardines from the company El Manar. From Nigeria, Geisha Mackerel and Titus (and Hot Titus) sardines; from Morocco, which is actually the largest exporter of sardines in the world, Safi (and Hot Safi). The list goes on and on.
My point is, it’s helpful to remember that the trendiness of these particular items and brands is the whitewashed tip of a very large and diverse iceberg. There’s a whole world out there of flavorful small fish and other seafood, packed in all kinds of sauces, by companies that have been doing this non-stop since before the turn of this century or the debut of NYT Cooking.
And their history is more important than you might imagine.
On Monterey Bay, the Ohlone peoples lived sustainably for centuries with a diet that included much local seafood before they were displaced by colonizers and forced to move to Missions. Their sustainable life ways meant the coastal ecosystems they unwillingly left behind were thriving.
When Chinese immigrants arrived in the mid-19th century for the Gold Rush, they also began fishing – and actually built the commercial fishing industry on California’s coast. Using their own technology, the curving sampan boat, Chinese immigrants in Monterey Bay caught abalone, shrimp, and squid, exporting most of it. They turned a small fortune by selling salt-packed squid to China to evade that country’s salt tax while still bringing in the flavor people craved.
One of the most prosperous of the coastal settlements, called China Point, was later burned down in an act of hatred during swelling anti-Chinese sentiment in 1906, after prominent white people and the local white-run media called openly for its destruction. This was after 25 years of new laws passed explicitly to limit the prosperity of Chinese settlers and their ability to catch, process, and sell fish.
Later, many of these same Chinese workers and their descendants went to work on Cannery Row for white cannery owners, where their labor, skills, and knowledge were both invaluable and had been so devalued that they could be hired for much less than they once made when running their own catches.
The China Point arson of 1906 was one of many similar acts of violence by white immigrants against Asian communities on the West Coast. Chinatowns were burned in arson across California: in Los Angeles in 1871, in Antioch in 1876, in San Jose and Martinez in 1877. There were several massacres, driven in part by genocidal rhetoric from elected officials and the press. This is a tiny sampling of the violence against Chinese people — and anyone perceived to be Chinese, as hatred casts a wide net — that is part of our nation’s history.
In more than one of these massacres and acts of arson across the West, the attacking mobs made clear that they were angry at the idea that Chinese workers were taking jobs or money that the whites were entitled to — or, worse, that Chinese people were building prosperity through their communities, in ways white people didn’t know how to do for themselves. As they had during the Gold Rush, white settlers made clear who this bounty was for — who would do the hardest labor, and who would get to thrive.
This intersection of labor issues, racism, and immigration is a huge part of the fish canning industry to this day.
In the United States today, 62.8 percent of butchers and fish processing workers were born outside the United States, and nearly half of those who work jobs such as packing cans are also foreign-born.1
This same pattern holds outside the United States, in places like Japan, which relies on Vietnamese migrants to do the labor of its fishing industry. In Norway, many seafood workers come from poorer parts of Europe; in Poland, they come from Ukraine. It’s hard work, and it almost always relies on labor from those in economic desperation, who by virtue of their ethnicity or country of origin are prevented from holding power, and usually, because of legal loopholes, earn significantly less for their labor than members of the state’s favored ethnic groups. It’s everywhere.
In case you’re wondering what it might be like to work in a fish cannery, here’s a job advertisement from the website of Icicle Foods, located in Petersburg, Alaska:
Seafood processing is physically demanding work that requires both strength and endurance. It's hard work! You need to ask yourself if you have the stamina to handle this type of work. You should be healthy and willing to work under these conditions. Be advised that this type of work involves strenuous as well as repetitive tasks. People with back or wrist problems should consider employment in another industry.
Not everyone is willing to do the physically demanding manual labor that is required to process fish. If you have any doubts at all, it is in your best interest not to apply for this type of work.
The bulk of the work in question is referred to as “sliming” the fish, removing viscera and cutting off unwanted body parts. The work environment is wet, cold, and noisy, a sensory nightmare. Depending on the catch, workers may work in excess of 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Icicle Foods puts all these caveats up front, then boasts that the work, which starts at $12.19/hour, is good, because of the overtime available. For the low price of your body and the repetitive motion injuries that may haunt you for life, you can earn overtime pay and “reach financial goals.” The workforce is not unionized, and all overtime is time-and-a-half, for a maximum of $19.13/hour for overtime hours only, for those who’ve been with the company for at least 5000 hours.
Workers can live in bunked, gender-segregated housing (“strictly enforced”) for $5/day, and eat for $4.24/meal. The housing offers free wifi and ping-pong tables when the weather is nice.
“Remember,” the website says: “No fish, no work. Lots of fish, lots of work.” No hours are guaranteed. Workers take on much of the risk, and none of the profit.
Not that fish processing has ever been glamorous, but I’m willing to bet the canneries are a much less enjoyable work environment than the methods used by coastal indigenous people or even the Chinese settlers who dried their catches in the sun, in their community, life and work mingling in the open air.
In 2008, the same summer I went to Kristiansand, I was working in Warsaw, Poland as an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. During my second year, I worked in the non-immigrant visa section at the U.S. Embassy, where I managed a program called Summer Work & Travel.
Summer Work & Travel, or SWT, is marketed as an exchange program for foreign post-secondary students to “come to the United States to share their culture and ideas with the people.” In practice, it’s a funnel for cheap labor, mainly from teenagers and kids in their early 20’s, who come to work as au pairs, summer camp counselors, beach resort staff, teachers, and in a number of other hard-to-fill jobs, including cleaning and packing fish in canneries.
By the time visa applicants got to our window, they’d already cleared most of the paperwork. Our job as non-immigrant visa adjudicators was to decide whether they overcame the presumption, written into U.S. law, that every traveler is actually intending to immigrate and remain in the United States. In practice, officers assess the strength or weakness of applicants’ “ties” to their country of residence. It’s incredibly subjective.
Usually, I found this work easy. My Polish was fluent, my Russian passable, and I found it pleasant to engage people in conversation. Most of the time, I felt solid enough in my assessment that I could deliver even bad news with kindness and respect. Whenever I could make someone’s dream come true, I did. It’s a nice feeling.
Summer Work & Travel was a trickier process. We still had to uphold the law. On the other hand, there was an unspoken pressure to get as many teen laborers in as possible to help fill the gaps in seasonal employment around the country.
There’s one interview I remember particularly well. A young woman with dark hair, a large crooked nose and very focused energy approached my window. I saw on her application that she was from Belarus, and that her destination in the States was Icicle Foods in Petersburg, Alaska. I asked her about it. She knew she’d be gutting fish all summer, but she acted like it was going to be the best thing that ever happened to her. I wanted that to be true for her, too.
So when she stood in front of me at the window, 100 percent of her energy radiating the desire to go to this freezing workplace in Alaska, I found myself imagining a whole life for her. I saw her in the employee housing and dining hall. I saw her saving up for a small road trip at the end of the summer with some of the friends she made. I saw her, possibly, deciding to stay, or falling in love, or, maybe, finding a soft American man she could live with and grafting herself into his life for as long as she needed to put down roots of her own. These were all projections of my imagination, of course, but no previous applicant had that effect on me.
And I’m not saying I failed to uphold the law, but I realized I really didn’t care what she did, if she ever worked in the cannery at all. I felt I had no right to get in this woman’s way. When someone’s life energy is that powerful, your only real job is to part the waters and let them run.
Seven years later, on a trip to Alaska, I wandered through the city of Petersburg and found myself outside the Icicle Foods cannery. I thought of that young woman and wondered if any of my projections about her were real. The job site matched my imagination, though. Sure enough, there were tables outside painted like chess or checker boards, although no one sat at them.
At a store in town, I bought a pair of the Xtratuf waterproof boots I saw everyone walking around in. I brought the boots back to Seattle, and hardly wore them until last spring on the farm. I’m different now than I was then in many ways, including the circumference of my calves, and they don’t quite fit anymore. But they remind me of that place, and how everything connects, how one worker’s nightmare is for someone else a step towards their dreams.
How this is terribly unjust. And also, how powerful it is to keep wanting, keep loving, keep fighting, keep believing, and keep moving forward, one painstaking step at a time, knowing that somewhere along the path are people you can part the waters for, and people who will part the waters for you.
One thing I that needs moving forward: Of all the tinned fish companies in the United States, I have yet to find a single one that is tribally or indigenous-owned.
Lummi Island Wild practices sustainable fishing and offers a can of sashimi-grade tuna for $8 that’s good enough to scarf down right out of the can. It is named for the island, which is named for a people who are still alive and well. Their representative clarified: “We are not a tribal business but we could not do what we do and love without the strong relationship we have with Lummi fishing families and other northwest treaty tribes.”
There’s a Washington oyster company called Ekone, which recently merged with the better-known Taylor Shellfish Co. Their smoked oysters look delicious. On the company website, they state that “Ekone is a Chinook word meaning ‘Good Spirit.’” But it seems that neither founder Nick Jambor nor his wife, Joanne are Chinook (they did not respond to a request for clarification). They’re just the private owners of intertidal grounds who had the capital to buy land, build a smokehouse, and get their products into restaurants.
I know this is “just how the world works,” especially in the United States: People with capital, almost always white people, supported by the state, claim land or water and turn a profit on ecosystems that were co-created and maintained by people who fished in non-extractive ways. The fact that these companies are using sustainable fishing technologies – many of which were brought forward by indigenous fishers to help restore populations after so much damage has been done by white commercial fishers – is progress. But it still feels wrong to me that they use indigenous words without at least paying some kind of reparations.
The sooner white settlers start giving back what isn’t ours, the sooner we’ll discover what is. I fantasize sometimes about what it must have been like before we arrived, back when people said things like, “When the tide is out, the table is set,” because of the sheer abundance of shellfish on the beaches. Days some elders still remember, when you could stick your hand in the water and feel the bodies of so many salmon swimming by. A single drop of the net filling with smelt, later fried whole and eaten with gratitude and anticipation for the season to come. Before overfishing, and dams, and red tide.
I had a dream one time that the salmon were as big as dragons. We picnicked by the river just to watch them swim by, great godlike beings. I still believe that such wonders are possible.
Earlier this week I watched a TikTok Live of Vietnamese workers shucking oysters in a Japanese factory. The host frequently turns toward the camera and smiles or laughs. The last time I went into the Live, there were more than 15k people viewing, many of them sending “gifts” that pop up on the screen in a nearly unending stream.
This is one of my favorite trends – people showing the work they do, work that feeds the world, effectively also side-hustling for the small amount of money they receive from doing Live videos.
In the TikTok economy, users can send gifts of varying value. Those gifts become Diamonds, which become money. TikTok takes 50 percent; the creators get the other 50 percent.
To me, this simultaneously feels a little dystopian and also like a small way for love, in the form of money, to pass from one part of the world to another; from a computer on the West Coast to an oyster-shucker an ocean away. A little thanks, a little declaration that there can be enough for us all.
In the early 20th century in Monterey Bay, California, workers at the fish canneries – many of whom were immigrants, including Chinese workers descended from their once-prosperous forebears – were summoned to work by a whistle. Each cannery had its own unique call, a language that could be understood by every worker, regardless of country of origin. When the night’s catch came in and it was time for work to begin, the songs of the canneries would echo over the water.
I imagine that, often, the boats must have come in at similar times, so that sometimes the whistles overlapped, traveling on the wind, gently breaking the morning’s peace, not unlike the way that different birds all sing together if you happen to be in their world at the right time of day.
The work was unromantic and underpaid, with the smell of sweat and dismembered fish permeating the entire area. It was an oppressive and exploitative system that relied on racist policies and practices to keep wages and worker rights down, a system that persists to this day.
There must also have been, in those salted mornings, in the echo of the whistles on the water, a reminder of the beauty of this world, and some gratitude for the sea and all it provides.
I can only imagine.
Best of the tinned fishes taste-off: For this piece, I decided to try a number of tinned fish products from as wide a range as I could access.
La Bonne Mer sardines in butter and thyme (Mediterranean, canned in France), $6-8: This was the first product I tried, at the recommendation of one of my farm’s owners. I was glad she instructed buyers not to eat them right out of the can, instead re-heating them in a pan and serving with potatoes and a squeeze of lemon, which is exactly what I did. I genuinely enjoyed them, but most importantly I loved how easy it was to prepare them and how well they satiated me. 8/10
Fishwife Smoked Albacore Tuna (from the Pacific Northwest - U.S. and Canada), $12: I bought this last year during a shift at the farm store when I simply needed a snack and found it to be annoyingly delicious right out of the can. It’s too expensive and so much of this company’s overhead is marketing and investor money, so I wouldn’t do it on the regular, but I have to admit their packaging is practically collectible. 9/10
Lummi Island Wild Albacore Tuna (from Washington State), $8: This is advertised as “sashimi-grade” and while I would never confuse it with actual sashimi, this was definitely tastier than your average canned tuna and needed no dressing-up. Would be great in onigiri. 9/10
Tiny Tots sardines (from Norway), $4: These were fine and an excellent value, two layers of sardines packed into one can. I found them to be a little smelly. They were also the first sardines I really got close to, so they bore the burden of me working out my conceptual aversions to the fish. They did provide a nice flavor to the dish I ate them in, which included couscous and a variety of rapini, but I wasn’t excited to eat them on their own. 6/10
Bela Smoked Sardines in Olive Oil (from Portugal), $4: Honestly a great choice for plain sardines. They were easy to eat with just a little bit of lemon juice and zest, without cleaning, right out of the can. The ones I had were smoked and stored in olive oil, and I had them with some quality sour cream and chopped arugula atop a fluffy waffle. 8/10
Kyokuyo Yakiiwashi Daikon Oroshi (from Japan), $4: A pleasant stretch for my palate, I ate these seasoned sardines with rice, roasted sweet potatoes, green beans, and pickled daikon with a healthy dash of Bachan’s barbecue sauce. This preparation, similar to La Bonne Mer’s, is meant to be heated to bring out the flavors in the sauce, which includes grated radish, soy sauce, and plum paste. 9.5/10
Tiny Fish Co. Smoked Mussels in Escabeche (from the Pacific Northwest), $15: Honestly this is annoying to me because of the price point, but I devoured these. I fried up some passable croquetes to eat with them and plated up some watermelon radish and cucumber, all squirted with lemon juice, but it took everything in me not to eat every mussel right out of the can. 10/10, unfortunately.
Ocean’s Smoked Wild Mackerel - Juniper & Coriander (from Scotland), $6-8: This is probably going to become a staple for me — even at this price point. I love the intensity of the flavor in the fish and the flaky texture. I did not rinse nor heat it. This is the one I would bring to a picnic, slather on bread or crackers, and call it good. 12/10
PS: I’m trying out comments on this post. Perfect place to share your favorite tinned fish/recipes/stories. Off we go!
Note: This data is not, and cannot be, disaggregated to differentiate between the seafood industry and other types of meat production. For more information, see “Sea to Table: The Role of Foreign-Born Workers in the Seafood Processing Industry,” published by the New American Economy Research Fund and based largely on American Communities Survey data, published May 3, 2017
I love seafood but have not tried much canned fish ... I am not definitely interested in trying out the ones you gave above 8/10 ratings! :)
Thanks for sharing, and thanks for writing!