Pax Sardinia
Sardines, Steinbeck and home
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I was making my way to the tin fish aisle at the local bourgeoise supermarket when I saw two employees approaching the same location from the other side. I stood back and watched the action unfold. One of them seemed to have brought the other along to look at something. The leader pointed to the tin fish and started laughing. The follower laughed along with him. I could not overhear their conversation over the pop music that covered every crevice of the store. It probably went something like, "This is where they keep nine-dollar tinned fish. Can you believe that? 9 dollars for this little tin?"
Like most such trends, I don't know where and when the expensive tinned fish trend originated. One day, it was everywhere—wine bars, coffee shops, restaurants. Supermarkets now have separate aisles for regular and expensive tinned fish—housed in the same aluminum cans of identical dimensions, only differentiated by their brand labels. The expensive ones obviously have that artisanal premium mediocre vibe.
I was there for sardines. My girlfriend likes them on everything bagels. I am drawn to them because I grew up eating plenty of fish on the southern coast of India. There was fish for at least one meal every day. But, I did not like sardines growing up. The ones back home were not canned of course. Canning originated in Europe in the 1800s because fish were not easily available year-round, so you needed a way to preserve them longer. It was also a good source of protein and sodium for people on the move, such as the Navies and traders crossing the ocean. Fish, particularly sardines, are available year-round in the Arabian Sea, so canning never took off. It also helped that topical regions had other methods of preserving fish, such as drying them in the sun. I remember the smell of dried fish. I can hallucinate and catch a whiff of it even now cause it smells so strong and terrible. In the summer, when the catch was plenty, and the sun was harsh, you could smell dried fish from a few blocks away.
Sardines have an unforgiving smell in all forms - dry, raw, fried, cooked in a curry, does not matter. My mom often fried them after rubbing them in a thick red paste of spices. According to my mom, sardine bones are an optional delicacy you can nibble on instead of picking them and putting them aside. I hated how the little bones felt in my mouth and how long it took to pick the fish between them. So, I avoided eating sardines for the longest time. My mom complained that I ate only fancy fish, like King Fish, a buttery, Arabian sea version of salmon. They were in season most of the year except for the monsoon. King fish was expensive. I can't explain why I gravitated towards such luxury tastes as a child, but this trouble has followed me into adulthood.
I examined the labels on the tinned sardines on my shelf. Several of them say product of Portugal on the packaging. Except one - an American brand that proclaims that the sardines were farmed by small families in the North Atlantic ocean. I imagined it must be made in Maine or something, but upon looking at the world map, I realized that the coast of the North Atlantic Ocean could mean anywhere between Maine and Spain or Suriname and Ireland. Digging further, I found that half of the yearly production of sardines in the world comes from Morocco (off the coast of the North Atlantic of course), which produces 1.4 million tonnes of Sardines. Over 70% of the fish is exported to other parts of the world. Portugal and Spain, which are right opposite the coast of Morocco, are other big producers of canned sardines. From a cursory observation of tin fish labels, Portugal produces expensive tin fish, and the inexpensive tins that make no mention of the origin of its contents come from Morocco.
The strait of Gibraltar that Morocco, Spain, and Portugal share has excellent conditions for sardines to thrive. The warm winds in the region push away the warm water from the coasts which causes cooler water from the bottom of the ocean to rise to the top. This phenomenon is called upwelling. The water that rises up is rich in nutrients and plankton that enables sardines to thrive. The conditions are reminiscent of the coast of central California, which John Steinbeck mythologized in his novels.
When Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row - the street that housed sardine canneries in Monterrey was still known as Ocean View Avenue, and the region was at the peak of its sardine production, during which it produced 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes of sardines every year. The Second World War caused the price of fish oil and canned sardines to surge. State fishery biologists warned that anything over 250,000 tonnes of sardine farming per year was unsustainable. These concerns were brushed away by more immediate and patriotic impulses - about this, Steinbeck wrote, "The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons . . . "
The canneries began to slump in the post-war economy and never really recovered. Sardine production fell every year after that. 24,000 tonnes of Sardines were caught in 1960—which is ironic since Ocean View Avenue was renamed to Cannery Row, after the eponymous novel, in 1958. Sometimes, naming a thing signifies the beginning of its death. Steinbeck named the excess and the rot he saw all around him during Pax Sardinia.
Similar boom and bust cycles of sardine fishing have occurred elsewhere. In January of 1972 in Peru, The El Niño warm Pacific current pushed fish far out to sea, making them more vulnerable to extinction. By June, the CIA reported that catches were only 10% of normal. The Ministry of Fisheries declared the fish meal industry was in crisis by September. El Nino years are bad for fishing because it replaces upwelling with downward movement of warm water, known as downwelling. La Nina years, on the other hand, produce more upwelling and tend to be suitable for fishing.
Industrial fishing is sublime horror at a distance. I'm nibbling on tin fish while reading about this nebulous nexus of machinery and randomness of nature. A nexus that feeds off nutrient-rich bays across the world for a few decades before moving to better pastures1. It suddenly makes sense to me why Call of Cthulhu, a masterful work of sublime horror at a distance, was written in the 1920s, as the world moved into an era of mass production and became more interconnected with telephones and cheap paperbacks. It became increasingly impossible to escape the tragedy and wretchedness of it all. Furthermore, modern psychology implored the western educated man (such as Steinbeck and Lovecraft) to shine a similarly bright light inward - hence why Call of Cthulhu starts with the line, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
Two people report seeing Cthulhu in the story, one of whom is a Norwegian sailor. There is something very primitive about the ocean. It is still unconquered, and much of it is unexplored. The effects of technology on the ocean are more visceral. Perhaps this is why Cthulhu likes to hang out in the ocean. I like to think this explains why all the characters in Steinbeck's novels set on the coast tend to be humorless, miserable, and tragic. They were too close to Cthulhu.
When I was young, there was a fish vendor who would come by on his bicycle every morning with the fresh catch of the day. The fish were iced in a basket strapped onto a carrier at the back of the bike. Later on, he exchanged his bicycle for a motorbike, while still retaining the air horn that signaled his arrival every day. A few years later, news spread that the ice used to preserve fish at the dock was high in ammonia. Everyone slowly ditched the fish vendor and started buying fish from the supermarket. Supermarkets were new to us then, and no one knew where the fish came from, so that erased everyone's worries about ammonia-poisoned fish.
In his book Rings of Saturn, W.G Sebald writes about Roger Casement, a British Consul who published a report about King Leopold's atrocities in the late 1800s in the Congo. Mr Casement's report was praised in Britain, but he was immediately transferred to South America, where he would write similar reports about the treatment of native people in Columbia. During World War I, he tried to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising , which sought independence for Ireland. He was eventually charged with high treason and executed.
I was reminded of Roger Casement while reading about the sardine fishing industry. We are all proto-Roger Casements now, tapping into tragedy and atrocities everywhere in the world but without the patience or pro-social nature of Roger Casement.
Previously I wrote about how stories involving fish tend to be tragic
Newer standards are in place to prevent overfishing. The aforementioned tinned fish from Portugal is usually certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, an international standards organization focused on sustainable fishing and best practices. However, these standards are lacking in Morocco, which produces half the sardines consumed by the world. Both countries fish from the same region, so it seems like standardization needs wider adoption to be effective and not just a marketing tool to assuage Western consumers.