Sardine

• 1. Introduction

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  Sardines are among the most widely eaten fish on earth, yet the word itself has never quite settled into a single meaning. Packed into tins, hauled in purse seines at night, or pressed into barrels for export to Catholic Europe, these small oily fish occupy a strange position in the natural world: abundant enough to feed nations, yet so loosely defined that the United Kingdom's Sea Fish Industry Authority classifies them simply as young pilchards. The FAO and WHO together identify 21 species that may legally be labeled sardines on a can. So what exactly are we eating, and where did this slippery name come from? The answer reaches back to ancient Greece, a disputed island, and a word for a gemstone the color of blood. It runs through the fishing harbors of Cornwall, the canneries of Monterey Bay, and a folk tale about a ship that supposedly blocked the port of Marseille. The documentary ahead will trace each thread.

• 2. A Name Without a Fixed Address

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  Aristotle mentioned the fish sardinos in a passage that survives only as a fragment quoted by Athenaios. The Greek word may derive from Sardinia, the large island in the western Mediterranean. But Sardinia is over 1,000 km from Athens, and scholars have noted it seems hardly probable that the Greeks would have obtained fish from so far at a time relatively so early as that of Aristotle, even though the Myceneans did trade with the Sardinians during the late Bronze Age. A second theory links the name not to a place but to a color. The flesh of some sardines and pilchards is a reddish-brown shade similar to certain varieties of red sardonyx, a gemstone the ancients obtained from Sardis, the capital of ancient Lydia in what is now western Turkey. The Greek root sardion carries a meaning tied to the color red, and may be cognate with the name of that city. The French sardine, adopted into English in the 15th century, passed through Latin sardina before reaching back to those disputed Greek origins.

• 3. How Many Species, How Many Names

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  FishBase, a comprehensive database of fish information, lists at least six species as pilchards, over a dozen as sardines proper, and many more with qualified compound names. The genus Sardinella alone contains 25 species, including the Indian oil sardine, the round sardinella, and the Madeiran sardinella. The European pilchard, Sardina pilchardus, is sometimes called the true sardine. The South American pilchard, Sardinops sagax, can reach 39.5 cm in length and a maximum mass of 490 g. One working criterion draws the line at 15 cm: fish below that length are sardines, larger ones are pilchards. The European sprat, Sprattus sprattus, complicates things further. Though not a true sardine, it is sometimes marketed as the brisling sardine, demonstrating that commercial naming can diverge sharply from biological classification.

• 4. Catching and Processing

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  Sardines feed almost exclusively on zooplankton and gather wherever it is abundant. Fishers exploit this habit by working at night, when the fish rise toward the surface to feed. The dominant method is the purse seine, a large encircling net that draws closed at the bottom like a purse string. Stationary traps called fishing weirs, built from stakes driven into the seabed along the coast, catch sardines as schools swim past. Once hauled in, the fish are submerged in brine for the journey to shore. From there, they enter an industrial pipeline: sold fresh, dried, salted, smoked, or processed into fish meal for animal feed. Sardine oil has historically served the manufacture of paint, varnish, and linoleum. The chief use, though, has always been direct human consumption.

• 5. Nutrition and Low Footprint

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  A 100 g serving of canned sardines supplies 185 calories and contains 21% protein and 10% fat, with negligible carbohydrates. Vitamin B12 stands out: that same serving delivers 375% of the recommended daily value. Phosphorus reaches 29% of the daily value, and niacin reaches 26%. The combined monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids in a 100 g serving amount to about 7 g. Because sardines sit low in the food chain, feeding on zooplankton rather than other fish, they accumulate far less mercury than larger species commonly eaten by humans. Their production also carries a relatively low impact in terms of greenhouse gas output, two properties that have made nutritionists and environmental advocates take note of them in recent decades.

• 6. Cornwall and the Pilchard Trade

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  Pilchard fishing became a major industry in Cornwall, England from around 1750, and it thrived for roughly a century and a quarter before entering decline around 1880. Catches swung wildly from year to year: in 1871 the Cornish catch reached 47,000 hogsheads, but by 1877 it had fallen to just 9,477. A hogshead held between 2,300 and 4,000 pilchards, and when packed with pressed fish it weighed 476 pounds. The pilchards traveled mainly to Catholic countries in southern Europe, particularly Italy and Spain, where they were known as fermades. Bristol served as the chief market for the oil pressed from the fish, where factories used it to lubricate machinery. The trade was prosperous enough to inspire a satirical drinking toast, recorded by the industry, that called on the Pope to extend Lent by six months and praised pilchards for saving souls. Stanhope Forbes and other artists of the Newlyn School documented the fishing life of the region in numerous works. In 1997 Cornish sardines gained their own commercial branding, and in March 2010, under European Union law, they received Protected Geographical Status.

• 7. Monterey to Maine

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  Across the Atlantic, the American canning industry built its peak in the 1950s, then began a long retreat. The canneries clustered in Monterey Bay, along what became known as Cannery Row in Monterey County, California, the stretch that John Steinbeck made famous in his novel of the same name. Those canneries failed in the mid-1950s. The last large sardine cannery in the United States, the Stinson Seafood plant in Prospect Harbor, Maine, ran for 135 years before closing on the 15th of April 2010. Five years later, in April 2015, the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to direct NOAA Fisheries Service to halt the commercial season in Oregon, Washington, and California because of a dramatic collapse in Pacific sardine stocks. The ban affected roughly 100 fishing boats holding sardine permits, though far fewer were actively fishing when the order came down. The season would normally have ended on the 30th of June; the council expected the closure to last more than a year.

• 8. Language and Legend

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  The phrase packed like sardines has been crowding into English prose since at least 1829, when the French expression encaisses comme des sardines appeared in a novel titled La Femme, le mari, et l'amant. An 1841 issue of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction translated the phrase directly into English as packed up like sardines. By 1845 the form packed like sardines in a tin-box was in print, and by 1854 the version packed like sardines in a can had settled into the language. A children's game called Sardines reverses the logic of hide-and-seek: one child hides, and each finder squeezes into the same hiding spot until only one person remains outside searching. In Marseille, the Mediterranean city long associated with exaggeration, residents tell a folk tale about a sardine so enormous it blocked the port in the 18th century. In fact, the vessel that ran aground there was a ship named the Sartine, not a fish at all, but the story proved more durable than the facts.