The Tinned Fish Backlash Was Inevitable

Tinned seafood was too weird, too niche, and not nearly aspirational enough for a “book-buying audience.” One pandemic, a Times Square sardine store , and many memes later, the tides have changed. One can pick up a $1,670 embroidered sardine clutch at NET-A-PORTER , and this season’s Anthropologie window displays sport giant, sparkling sardine cans as backdrops .

Cue the tweets and TikToks about tinned fish having a disheartening “ recession energy .” Cue the simultaneous groans about the shocking $20 to $50 price tags on many imported conservas (and the resulting markups for those premium products at bars and restaurants). New York magazine writer Tammie Teclemariam called tinned fish “the biggest scam” of 2022 .

For me, tinned fish was never meant to be something we incorporate into every meal and every outfit, every day. Sometimes I see a name trying to convince me to make canned albacore nachos, and I think to myself, “I don’t even want that.

We’ve taken this thing too far.” At times, I see a grocery store tin name marked up 100% on a menu and I’m reminded of a Willy Staley tweet from years ago about a fictional (but all-too-plausible) Bushwick restaurant dish: “ We dump a can of Ortiz tuna onto a cool-looking plate with a bunch of Cape Cod chips. It costs $30 and it’s called ‘Hot Girl Lunch.’” “A $30 tin of Spanish conservas on a restaurant menu has always felt basic to me—and I’d say the same thing about a $120 tin of caviar,” Sutton tells me. “They feel like easy, phoned-in luxuries, for the most part.” “I don’t generally find restaurants to be as fluent in talking about tinned fish as they are about wine. I don’t typically leave a restaurant saying, ‘Wow, I need to try that exact tin again,’ the way I might get excited about a grower Champagne that a sommelier waxes poetic about,” he explains.

Sutton will make the occasional exception at restaurants like Cart-Driver in Denver. “They pair the conservas with hot sourdough piada, black olive butter, and a sambal pepper relish—it’s nothing I can make at home!” Even members of the internet’s long-standing tinned fish community have mixed feelings about their hobby going platinum. Reddit user u/mikeczyz tells me that he kicked off the r/CannedSardines subreddit in 2017 after a comment from his doctor sent him down a rabbit hole, trying to learn more about this category of food and introduce more of it into his diet. Now the subreddit (which he still moderates) has about 117,000 members, and the number of daily posts has went up dramatically since I joined it in 2021.

I asked u/mikeczyz how he feels about canned fish becoming such a massive phenomenon. “ I wouldn’t say it’s gotten out of hand, but parts of it feel pretty far from where it kicked off. The visibility is great: more access, more brands, more creativity, and it’s cool to see the converts,” he tells me. “But I do miss when it felt like a bit of a hidden gem, and the whole aesthetic push, especially from fish-fluencers, can sometimes feel a little performative .

Oh, yeah, and the whole Fishwife phenomenon!” Indeed, when I first met Fishwife founders Becca Millstein. Caroline Goldfarb in 2021, their approach to branding and marketing stood out from competitors specifically as it was aimed at women. There was the brand’s name (a nod to a historic slang term for a foulmouthed woman), its playfully illustrated logo (a woman transporting a basket of fish on her head while smoking a pipe), and the founders’ insistence that tinned fish was “a hot girl food.” In a Shark Tank appearance in 2023, Millstein shared that the firm had made $2.6 million in 2022 and was on track to make $5.8 million in 2023 .

As buying interest skyrockets, the pressure to produce quickly and cheaply can erode sourcing practices. In Galicia, legacy growers are already operating at full capacity within fishing quotas, yet they feel they’re losing marketplace share as interest peaks.

Meanwhile, domestic canneries need to find skilled labor to meet the buying interest.” Langley agrees, calling the mainstreaming “both a blessing. A responsibility.” “With popularity comes dilution,” says Langley. “You get a lot of trend chasing without respect for the origin, the culture, the process. A good chunk of that money will go toward the Bumble Bees and StarKists of the world—and the era of “ protein maxing ” most certainly has something to do with this spike.