"Anchovies and Sardines Are a Climate Solution in a Can"
From Bloomberg via GetPocket, October 23, 2022
Tinned fish are among the lowest-carbon animal
protein available, with potential to curb the world’s enormous emissions
from food.
Andrés Albonigamayor stares down at the red deck of his fishing boat
as the last albacore are unloaded. It’s two hours before sunrise on the
wharf of Bermeo, a town in Spain’s Basque Country, and his crew of six
Senegalese men work in silence as wind whistles through the metal walls
of an empty warehouse nearby. There was a time when the wharf buzzed
with activity before the 7 a.m. auction, but the port hasn’t been
crammed with boats in years.
The 68-year-old captain shows no
emotion as the fish go in auction for a decent price. He’s the last of a
long dynasty of Bermean fishermen, and all he cares about is the next
catch. “I want to go out tomorrow again,” he says, marking the words
with the distinct pronunciation of native Basque speakers, a language so
old no one’s figured out when it originated. “I might not even go home
this time. I might just take a quick nap on the boat.”
Albonigamayor doesn’t know it, but he’s crucial in the fight against
climate change. Every time he goes out to sea, he brings back the
lowest-carbon animal protein available anywhere. Preserved in oil and
put in cans and jars in factories just a mile away, his catch of longfin
tuna becomes an unsung fix for a warming planet—a meal that’s cheap,
requires no energy for refrigeration, almost never spoils, and, with
some effort, can be harvested sustainably.
The way we eat is a
major source of the greenhouse gas emissions that are pushing global
temperatures to new extremes. To address this problem, investors are
funding the development of animal proteins that can be cultured in a laboratory
rather than raised on a farm, while food companies are marketing (with
significant difficulty to indifferent shoppers) meat substitutes made from plants.
It’s all part of the drive to break the connection between the
unstoppable human appetite for meat, poultry, and fish and the parallel
rise in planet-warming emissions.
But sitting on the supermarket
shelf, ready to eat without research and development or consumer shifts,
is an almost perfectly low-carbon protein that’s existed for two
centuries: tinned fish.
“Wild
fish give you the highest amount of protein with the lowest carbon
footprint,” says Gumersindo Feijóo, a chemical engineer at the
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain’s northern region of
Galicia. He’s studied the environmental and carbon impact of the tinned
fish industry since the 1980s. “Put it in a can and it gets even more
interesting, because it keeps the flavor and the nutritional value and
it doesn’t need refrigeration or cooking.”
Tinned fish—known as conservas
in Spain and Portugal, where they’ve never gone out of style—are making
a comeback in foodie culture, with chefs touting the ingredient on
menus and gourmet shops using the colorful retro designs on the tins to
lure customers. “It has such a long shelf life that the actual food
waste is almost zero,” says Henry Rich, owner of Rhodora, a wine bar in
the trendy Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, that aims to send
nothing to landfills. His menu is built around pickled vegetables, hard
cheeses, and tinned fish, all items that minimize spoilage. “And the
aluminum in the tin can be recycled and reused.”....
...Now, about those can openers, from the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 2018:
The Trouble With Tuna: ‘A Lot of Millennials Don’t Even Own Can Openers’ StarKist, Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea deal with slumping market amid competition from fresher options