The Truth about Baked Beans by Meg Muckenhoupt

Author:Meg Muckenhoupt [Muckenhoupt, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: NYU Press

How We Actually Eat: Fish from Cans

Once upon a time in the Victorian era sardines were a luxury food.166 Cans of tiny fish were a novelty, and fine dining sets came with special plates and forks for enjoying their oily, pungent taste. But as canneries expanded and fishermen grew more ambitious, sardines turned into bar food, then a staple in work men’s lunch boxes, then a vaguely unfashionable food found in expired tins at the bottom of grandma’s pantry.

The canning industry transformed Maine’s herring from fertilizer and lobster bait into a bar snack. Herring became sardines, salted, smoked, and packed into little metal boxes that were sent to gin mills and saloons around the nation to stimulate patrons’ thirst. Passamaquoddy Bay alone hosted 19 smokehouses for sardines by 1890.167 Unfortunately, these salted, smoked fish were never deemed suitable for upstanding, calm, bland family meals, and when Prohibition forced bars to close, most of the canneries closed too.168

Sardine canneries were Maine’s largest employers in the 1950s, with 6,000 Mainers stuffing herring into cans all over the coast in towns like Belfast, Lubec, and Eastport.169 The last sardine cannery in Maine—and the United States—was Stinson Seafood in Prospect Harbor. It closed in 2010.170 A newspaper article displayed typical fishing industry logic when the writer declared, “Once plentiful and unregulated, the supply of herring (unprocessed sardines) has been diminished by federal limitations and overfishing.” Outside observers would note that those federal limitations were actually a response to overfishing.

Maine’s sardine plants were also doomed by a lack of modernization for environmental and health codes. As the New England Historical Society wrote, “In Stonington, the waters around the factory turned red on days when the sardines were packed in tomato sauce, yellow when they were packed in mustard. The factory burned coal, so soot and dust settled on clothes drying on nearby lines.”171

Now, miles of Maine’s crinkled, crumpled seacoast look “natural” and “unspoiled” because the canneries, shipyards, and mills that served the herring fishermen and blueberry harvesters at Passamaquoddy, Mount Desert Island, Tremont, Southwest Harbor, and dozens of other ports have had time to rot and disappear.172 Bostonians and New Yorkers can come to relax in an atmosphere where the work of thousands of men and women has been erased from the shores, where they can forget New England’s industrial past.

Sardines have given way to tuna, a milder-tasting fish that isn’t packed in glops of oil and comes from distant shores—and is also being fished to extinction.

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