Can you really hear the sound of waves when eating canned tuna?
Text / Sun Chieh-heng
Editor's note: The author works at the National Sun Yat-sen University Marine Policy Research Center; this article is reposted from the author's Facebook page
That day I ran into Huga at the station, and only then did I remember that half a year earlier I had asked her to take photos of local canned seafood at a supermarket in France. Several months later, she had not only gone to the supermarket but had even bought the cans and brought them back to Taiwan, so on a Thursday night we began a little research and discussion about the cans.
In southern Brittany, France, purse-seine fishing for sardines has a history of more than a hundred years. The area produces 15,000 tonnes of sardines each year; half goes to the fresh market, and half goes to canning companies. However, starting in the 1990s, some local environmental groups argued that purse seining damages the ecosystem and demanded that the government restrict this fishing method.
In response to the environmentalists' appeal, the area's 18 small purse-seine boats formed the "Brittany Blue Association" and began self-regulating the vessels that go to sea and the number of fishing days, and they printed information on the cans that use their catch: the time of catch, the place of catch, the name of the fishing boat, the fishing method and so on. All the catch information was made transparent.
At the same time, the "Brittany Blue Association" kept improving its fishing gear to reduce bycatch and the chance of catching juvenile fish, and it successfully obtained the French official food label "Red Label" (Label Rouge), affirming the freshness and quality of its catch. They worked even harder to win recognition from the international certification body the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), hoping that the fishing method and traditional fishing grounds they had used for a hundred years could meet sustainability standards and continue on.
Huga said that in the supermarket she visited, cans certified with the Red Label were not much more expensive than ordinary cans (about 8 Taiwan dollars), and this type of can was popular with consumers and displayed in the most prominent position for sale.
In France, eating canned sardines is like drinking red wine: people look at the production time and the season of the ingredients. After buying canned fish, people often let it sit for a few days, then "flip it over" and let it sit for a few more days, so that the sardines in the can can be fully immersed in extra virgin olive oil. And because the can clearly labels all the important information about the catch, when people eat it they form a connection with the seafood in their mouths and with the ocean (just like how Xiaodangjia hears the sound of waves whenever he eats shrimp).
The takeaway from this little study is that both producers' and consumers' ways of thinking can keep up with the times.
If, on an island that calls itself a maritime nation, skipjack tuna is passed off as tuna, tuna is passed off as "sea chicken," and consumers are never told (or never care) where the fish they eat comes from or how it got there, then I think this is not maritime culture, nor is it seafood culture; it may simply be... no culture at all.
