Canned sardines have been a staple of my diet since I was in the womb. I can’t wait for this trend to die off, it has been so difficult to find them lately. I mean I understand all of the reasons for it, and I can at least appreciate that sardines are the most sustainable form of fishery we have, but goddamn it is super frustrating.
Destroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
Fishermen are weirdly powerful in the EU for an industry that employs few people and doesn't make a lot of money. I'm not clear how that works, I'm guessing because it's a job the public understand and has macho overtones. Fishing was a major part of the advocacy for Brexit despite being a smaller source of revenue than Warhammer.
This isn't on the politicians. If you look at it from the perspective of a politician, if you enact a strict fishing quota, you've personally decimated jobs in the industry. You've saved the industry, but said industry will never forgive you and will always hold the job loss against you. If overfishing causes job losses, that's on the fishermen, they're the ones to blame.
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
I've been eating sardines for years. My grandfather used to eat them and I somehow acquired a taste for them.
Instead of looking for sardines with sauces, just buy them in water and put your own sauce on them.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
Just came from a 2 week vacation in Portugal, they even had their own fancy (and very colorful) shops where they only sold canned sardines. Never seen such a range of products.
I assume you're talking about O Mundo Fantástico da Sardinha Portuguesa (The Fantastic World of The Portuguese Sardine). It's obviously a tourist trap and, btw, contributing to the craze.
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting went from viable to being outlawed --- I was worried that my children might live in a time when commercial fishing ceases to be tenable, but now that seems a near certainty.
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
When a fishery crashes, it is dramatic and takes a long time to recover if ever. There's been plenty of fisheries like cod that one could not conceive being depleted but it has been now for decades.
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
That's what happened to the Atlantic cod fishery. The biologists kept warning of collapse, the relevant regulators didn't want to piss off the fishermen, and didn't institute necessary restrictions, and then the fishery collapsed.
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
The overfishing situation seems dire across many species. I read that Mitsubishi is deep-freezing tuna in anticipation of its extinction. I don't know if that's actually their motivation, but they are definitely involved in tuna procurement.
And that is what remains of the Pacific sardine fishery. It used to be that sardines were plentiful all around Monterey, but during WWII fishermen used improved sensors to track down and remove all schools of sardines until they were gone. Since then attempts to reintroduce sardines to that stretch of California coast have all failed. This is a really huge loss to the whole ecosystem there.
Portugal almost made some fisheries extinct, we had to severely curtain fishing and still sardines would show up in the markets. I think fishermen notice, but they’re also incentivised to continue fishing because the price starts going up?
oh well, data centers are far more important than the world's food supply. now get off the internet and back to making more gigantic diesel generators.
The oceans are depleted. And some countries with shadow fleets are to blame more than the others. But somehow it’s not even a small priority for most countries. Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left. The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
There’s really no cause to raise a panic with lab-grown meat right around the corner. AI, FSD, electric cars, nuclear energy, and drones are eating up most of the VC money right now but lab-grown meat is waiting in the wings to take over in the next few decades.
I never saw this term used for fishing boats. Do you have any countries in mind? And what exactly is "shadow"?
> Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left.
I assume you are talking about the recent deaths of Pacific Gray whales.[1] They are dying because climate change has depleted their primary food source in the Arctic. They are not dying due to overfishing by humans.
So I've been thinking about this. It's more general than social media and sardines.
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
It is conspicuous leisure and a game of status in a time-poor world.
Or, as we used to call it, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. The odd thing is that most people that go to the overly-touristy places have very little to say. Sure there are the pictures for social media, however, these are of what the food is like and what the beverages are like and these could be taken anywhere.
There is no adventure involved in tourism, and adventure satisfies in ways that tourism never will. With adventure there is no knowing what to expect, there are logistics problems to solve and there is purpose, namely to get from A to B, preferably in one piece, which is not a given.
With tourism there are no such problems, people have 'slaves' wait on them for the duration of the trip. There is no need to interact with the actual natives, just the hospitality workers, as in the 'slaves'.
In the past, a lot of work went into getting time off for the working man, with local-ish tourism to take people out of the smog filled cities and to the seaside (in the UK and elsewhere). A few generations on and this has been baked in, nobody takes their time to enjoy the house they pay to live in, there is this default action of going on some type of package holiday.
The typical package holiday is for the time poor, with so many big sights that have to be packed in, always the same tourism trail. For example, Brits visiting the USA might imagine this road trip, to hire a car in LA, to drive to Vegas, on to spend 20 minutes at the rim of the Grand Canyon and then on to Flagstaff, as if there is anything to see there.
They get back having seen nothing except car parks and the Interstate. The mad dashing around means they get the required photos but there is no adventure. So they have to go on another trip. How about Machu Pichu, next time round?
So, off they go. They come back to their normal life and have nothing to say, apart from what the hotel, flight and food was like.
It is an industry made possible by cheap flights and cheap rental cars, with none of them being that cheap if externalities are to be included. Given where the world is going regarding the 'war for oil', this tourism is going to vanish quite quickly.
The thing about NYC and viralness that I myself noticed is how people line up for hours to try that new food thing at this particular restaurant/food truck that everyone raves about. Or a new bar/club. Or anything, really. The FOMO is quite literally tangible in this city if you're inquisitive enough to spot it.
Recent episode of the Odd Lots podcast, "How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can":
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
He was wrong. Animals don't "instinctively" reach a natural equilibrium when they're introduced to a new environment. They eat all the available food, die off en masse, and repeat, until the food sources which were vulnerable have all gone extinct and the only things left are able to survive.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
If we're going to continue to eat sea food, isn't plankton some of the best to eat? It's basically as low on the trophic chain as you can go, unless people start developing a taste for krill I guess.
We have apparently reached the stage of the attention economy where even sardines can experience a demand shock because someone branded eating only one food for three days as a "diet"
This is only going to get worse with AI and not just for food recommendations. Think "where do I go for a vacation" and then the recommendation is pretty much the same for everyone, and you end up in overcrowded places because everyone else got the same advice.
What a sad world we live in :(
Social medias have such a significant impact all over the planet, from overcrowded tourist spots dedicated to taking instagram pictures, to canned sardines diets.
Why do people fall for this kind of thing ? I still can't understand it. Is it all just an ego war ? That worries me
87 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 17.4 ms ] thread” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
https://balticwaters.org/en/baltic-sea-brief-60-the-final-he...
It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they told me I can't sell no stripers
And there's no luck in swordfishing here
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me.
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
0: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainabilit...
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/24479
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/sustainability/social/s...
https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/sustainability/social/s...
People will believe anything.
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24052026/pacific-gray-wha...
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-c...
Or, as we used to call it, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. The odd thing is that most people that go to the overly-touristy places have very little to say. Sure there are the pictures for social media, however, these are of what the food is like and what the beverages are like and these could be taken anywhere.
There is no adventure involved in tourism, and adventure satisfies in ways that tourism never will. With adventure there is no knowing what to expect, there are logistics problems to solve and there is purpose, namely to get from A to B, preferably in one piece, which is not a given.
With tourism there are no such problems, people have 'slaves' wait on them for the duration of the trip. There is no need to interact with the actual natives, just the hospitality workers, as in the 'slaves'.
In the past, a lot of work went into getting time off for the working man, with local-ish tourism to take people out of the smog filled cities and to the seaside (in the UK and elsewhere). A few generations on and this has been baked in, nobody takes their time to enjoy the house they pay to live in, there is this default action of going on some type of package holiday.
The typical package holiday is for the time poor, with so many big sights that have to be packed in, always the same tourism trail. For example, Brits visiting the USA might imagine this road trip, to hire a car in LA, to drive to Vegas, on to spend 20 minutes at the rim of the Grand Canyon and then on to Flagstaff, as if there is anything to see there.
They get back having seen nothing except car parks and the Interstate. The mad dashing around means they get the required photos but there is no adventure. So they have to go on another trip. How about Machu Pichu, next time round?
So, off they go. They come back to their normal life and have nothing to say, apart from what the hotel, flight and food was like.
It is an industry made possible by cheap flights and cheap rental cars, with none of them being that cheap if externalities are to be included. Given where the world is going regarding the 'war for oil', this tourism is going to vanish quite quickly.
https://youtube.com/@tinnedfishreviews
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-a-sardine-gets-fro...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqP18fQi_CM
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-a-sardine-gets-from-the-o...
Sadly Agent Smith was not wrong there.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
Wachowskis just don't know any better. You think it's air your breathing now? Oxygen? More like plant waste product.
Also no ecosystem is in perfect harmony. It's basically jenga tower where you pull a piece on a long enough scale it looks eternal.
Kippered herring is in stock, though.
I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.
Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.
Plus because they're eaten whole, you also get bonus stuff like calcium and phosphorus from the bones.
Meanwhile I hope the social media influencers leave herring alone and move on to mackerel.