Put a Lid On It

What can we learn from the tinned fish craze?

Oct 13, 2023

Prologue: Spain, autumn of 2012

I was once an unpaid and untalented intern at a fancy restaurant in Madrid. Once dinner service started the only job they trusted me to do was frying peppers and plating sausages. The former were neon green piparras looked like Basque Christmas lights and wrinkled up beautifully after a minute dancing in the fryer basket. A sprinkle of sea salt was all they needed to shine. The pork Chistorra sausages dripped ruddy paprika grease everywhere, making them tricky to plate without making a mess. Both were complimentary appetizers that we’d send to tables after they sat down. Juan Miguel, the owner, dubbed Jaun Mí for short, would yell out how many guests had arrived at which tables and I’d plate up their freebie snacks accordingly.

Yet every now and then a VIP table would arrive and get more than just piparras and chistorra. Whispers would come in from the servers: “Real Madrid midfielder Xabi Alonso is dining with us” or “American actor Kyra Sedgewick just sat down” and then Juan Mí would send out the good stuff, pulling out tall glass jars of our treasured white asparagus, tender, slender stalks whose prized flavor was a result of having seen less sun than a Portlander with agoraphobia.

Only the really special tables got ventresca, though. These precious tins of fish contained of the most tender part of the tuna belly. If this restaurant was in Japan they’d serve this raw and call it toro, but here ventresca was king of the fish, and the king lived in a can.

When I returned home from Madrid, ventresca was one of the first things I sought out. Heading to The Spanish Table on San Pablo I was delighted to find it in a small, red oval can from Ortiz, then less delighted to learn that it cost more than twenty dollars for less than four ounces of fish. When I opened the can I found find oily meat so savory and buttery soft that it felt worth every penny. As I sunk my teeth into a decadent mouthful of this fatty fish I wondered which of my friends I should tell first.

Let’s talk about tinned fish

When I recently heard tinned fish was having a moment I smiled and sighed with such force that Tyra Banks may coin a new word: “smighing.” This is because I am both literally the target audience for this trend and someone who experienced it a decade ago. So it struck me as curious that some strange amalgamation of COVID, TikTok, and chance yanked this niche European grocery item out of the pantry and into the sun.

To state the obvious, fish in cans is not new, even for "uncultured” Americans living far away from the ocean. Most of us have tasted the fishy mediocrity of Bumblebee or Starkist canned tuna in a school lunch or salad and understandably moved on. What’s new (for some) is the idea of fish in a can being a worthwhile and even revelatory culinary experience.

The tinned fish Americans are used to, those sad, moist lumps of maritime protein that smell like the oceanic flatulence are the antithesis of European tinned fish, where savory chunks of tender tuna arrive bathing in a jacuzzi of olive oil, capable of elevating an appetizer in the same self-explanatory way that chicken of the sea lowers morale in an office lunchroom or on a long flight. While American canned seafood is underwhelming without an ocean of mayonnaise on top of it, European seafood demands to be eaten nearly naked (the fish, not you, but whatever floats your boat I suppose). While our preserved fish are anonymous, the packaging gesturing at the unfathomably vast Pacific and saying “you get the idea,” the European version proudly possess a kind of tinned terroir, the rugged stretch of Galician coastline it was caught off of very much part of the marketing and appeal. This continental divide between pantries, European quality contrasted with American mediocrity, is the tension at the heart of the tinned fish fad.

Upstream causes

While tinned fish are shelf stable, trends are not. They never show up out of no where and never stay around for long. I believe there are three causes that explain tinned fishes resurgence, one that’s recent, one dating back to COVID, and one that’s evergreen.

Euro trip treats: I have to tell you about my trip to BarTHElona

Your Instagram feed isn’t lying to you: 50% of the US population and 110% of your stupid friends intent on having fun without you went to Europe this summer. As cases of COVID plummeted, cases of FOMO skyrocketed. The real winner, however, was tinned fish.

Now that international air travel is in full swing and Mediterranean countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal are getting many of the visitors, Americans have been trying canned seafood on their travels and returning home with a taste for the stuff. Back at home, they’re finding tinned fish date nights, cookbooks, subscriptions, subreddits, a two story tin temple in Manhattan called “The Fantastic World of the Portugese Sardine.” What a time to be alive.

Have opener? Can travel: Making high quality seafood simple and accessible

Many people feel uncomfortable prepping and cooking seafood because of the scales, fragile flesh, and pesky bones, as well as the perishability and food safety concerns. A lot of supermarket seafood smells bad before it’s even gone bad, so you can’t really blame them. Tinned fish bypasses all of this, arriving pre-portioned, pre-cooked, and armored against spoilage. All you need to enjoy it is a can opener.

This is a huge reason why people shut inside during the initial COVID lockdowns likely found European tinned fish to be so appealing. It was a mini-luxury, a simple way to mix up dinner and travel to Spain or Portugal without leaving your claustrophobic apartment. Add to that the hit of protein and omega-3s that you get from fatty seafood, and you have a compelling new way to stock your pantry.

As a part of our larger food culture, canned seafood cozily occupies the charming intersection of high brow meets low brow. While the flavors feel decidedly fancy, the medium of a can is unpretentious and democratic. Serving it gives off the same casually impressive “who, me?” energy of an effortlessly stylish pair of boots that cost a surprising amount of money.

Flavor: Less is more

Since good canned seafood is caught and preserved at the peak of freshness, the resulting tins and jars give jaded Americans a glimpse into what fresh, simple seafood can actually taste like. Compared to supermarket seafood, whose signature stink comes from the products being weeks old by the time you bring them home, fancy canned seafood tastes refreshingly savory, salty, and pure.

In the tinned fish craze we see a culinary philosophy very familiar to Tuscans, Basques, and even Californians: quality ingredients first. You can only get away with the minimalism of a Spanish appetizer like pan con tomate, literally just fresh tomato rubbed into toasted bread, if the tomatoes are in season and astoundingly fresh.

Similarly, canned Spanish tuna, Italian anchovies, or Portugese sardines wouldn’t be so decadent if the fish wasn’t the best and preserved at its peak. Implicit in the draw here is the timeless appeal of simple, fresh, quality fish that people have gone to great lengths to not mess up.

What’s the tinned fish backlash about?

Every trend creates an equal and opposite backlash. Eater formally signaled this era had arrived for tinned fish when they ran a takedown piece titled “Stop Trying to Convince Me Tinned Fish Is the Height of Luxury: Can we all admit that tinned fish is just okay?”

To be fair, after Caroline Goldfarb declared tinned fish to be hot girl food, (an act of marketing since Goldfarb is the head of tinned fish company Fishwife) it was only a matter of time until the contrarians came along to feast on her logic.

As far as I can surmise, there are three main reasons to be cynical about the tinned fish craze, two that are correct and one sounds right but misses the point.

This is a good but limited way to enjoy fish

Freshness is an elusive concept. Seafood is so perishable that even much of the sushi and poke we eat has been flash frozen to facilitate transport and food safety. Tinned fish can’t dodge this fate either— it must trade flavor and freshness to be shippable around the world. All canned fish must be cooked at high temperatures to make it shelf stable. As a result, preserved fish can never have the texture of good sushi or even a medium rare tuna or salmon filet you might throw on the grill. Put another way: if fresh fish is available and affordable where you live, why would you favor tinned fish other than saving time and effort?

Salty over the cost

In my experience, high quality tinned fish is not really an affordable luxury. Good Spanish or Portugese conservas are usually quite expensive. Paying top dollar for a small can of luxurious, but easily demolished sea protein is a great way to throw a fun wine night, but it’s not a recipe for frugal dining. In an economy where basic staples are more expensive than ever, hyping tiny servings of imported salty decadence plucked from distant seas is not in touch with how many people eat.

Tinned fish is best understood not just as a grocery, but a pantry status symbol. Serving it indicates that you are worldly, have the disposable income to both fund trips to Europe and boutique grocery shops at The Spanish Table, and are open-minded enough to try things with scary or weird names like razor clams or goose barnacles.

It’s giving great depression: This is a sad food to be excited about

Yet some people have critiqued tin fish for the literal opposite reason, insisting that think that getting excited about canned fish, the food of financial hardship, is a sad state of affairs signaling an impoverished society. In a widely viewed TikTok, Allison O’Connor remarked that

“The tinned fish trend is the most well branded indicator of economic downturn I have ever seen.”

The irony here is that O’Connor’s remark is correct in the broad strokes but doesn’t describe the actual trend she’s critiquing. Yes, historically canned fish has been a food of necessity, hardship, and frugality. However, the kind of tinned fish that’s getting all the social media hype retails for $9-$20 for a just few ounces of fish. Perhaps the genius of tinned fish then is how it hides fanciness in plain sight. Like many modern forms of cultural capital, it disguises a luxury good by putting it in a can that only resembles frugality, making it an inconspicuous and guilt-free form of indulgence.

American stereotypes, packed in like sardines

My verdict is that the tinned fish fad is just the latest embodiment of three distinctly American tendencies.

We love food but we’re ambivalent about cooking it.

Just as Trader Joe’s wildly viral snacks and frozen foods appeal to those of us that want to eat our way around the world without actually spending time in the kitchen or dirtying our dishes, tinned fish is a fun shortcut to the flavors of Europe. It plugs in easily to decadent appetizer boards that let us skip the cooking part of hosting so we can graze endlessly while feeling somewhat sophisticated about the whole affair.

We have a complicated and easily parodied relationship to Europe.

American college students and twenty somethings have this tendency to visit Europe once and proceed to make it their whole personality, lisp and all. Today, as Americans finally return to Europe post COVID, we’re witnessing our fascination with European food and culture take on both familiar and new forms.

Tinned fish is also an edible embodiment of how our collective obsession with travel, now basically a religion for privileged white people thanks to Instagram, can easily spiral into insidious forms of classism and elitism. Hating on tinned fish has become a convenient shorthand for criticizing wealthy white people, much as hating on pumpkin spice lattes and Live, Laugh, Love decor is for tearing down middle class white women or roasting Guy Fieri is for denigrating middle American men.

We oscillate between ignoring other countries and romanticizing them

Our earnest but somewhat naive “discovery” that canned seafood can actually be good echoes a larger American blindspot: just because we have the largest economy and military in the world doesn’t mean we are the best at much else. Since this truth is a tough thing for many Americans to hear, tone and timing are everything. If we have to be shaken out of our outdated American exceptionalism, we’d rather do so on vacation, in an overwhelmingly white country, ideally several aperol spritzes deep. However even if you find this insight palatable, it’s hard to act on outside of the literal low hanging fruit of appreciating other countries foods. Many of the other aspects of Europe we so readily romanticize on vacation are not easy to carry with us back across the Atlantic. The happiness of the Danes, the bicycle culture of the Dutch, or the socialized medicine of the Brits are much harder to bring home than a can of sardines is. Figuring out public transit, affordable healthcare, or a reasonable work life balance as our European peers have would take time and political willpower. Devouring their snacks is a more attainable goal as it doesn’t depend on context or Congress.

Conclusions: Sink or swim

For now, I say enjoy tinned fish. A can of smoked trout has saved more than one of my dinners from utter mediocrity. Salted anchovies are the secret to great salad dressing and extra savory beef stew. Ventresca truly is magical, the type of appetizer that can win friends and influence people.

Just don’t delude yourself or others about what’s in these fancy cans and what eating them really means. Americans on social media are quick to rebrand their consumption as sophistication while tearing down other peoples as ignorance. Status groceries like wine, cheese, and tinned fish make this as easy as critiquing someone else’s dinner while fiendishly documenting yours.

Repeatedly diving down the rabbit hole of fads usually satiates my curiosity and occasionally births blog articles as an indulgent side effect. It’s ultimately taught me that trends are as ubiquitous and fast-growing as they are slippery and polarizing, the seaweed of the internet. They come and go with the tides. Something that’s utterly hidden from view in the morning can be withering in the sun by evening, only to be swallowed up and washed away the next day. Soon tinned fish will be shoved aside to make room for more interpolations of Olivia Rodrigo songs, manically edited dances, and inside jokes that mutate and replicate every three and a half seconds.

If one of these new discoveries interests or benefits you, go ahead and enjoy it, but the closest thing I have to advice is: don’t expend too much energy keeping track of all of the flotsam and jetsam online. It’s exhausting. Your time is better spent planning your next tinned fish night with the squad. I’ll bring the ventresca and some vinho verde if you promise to tell me all about your trip to Barcelona.

If you’ve got thoughts or questions about tinned fish, trends, or your recent trip to Barcelona I’d honestly love to hear them.

Wryly Reilly

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