VOL. 2
Tinned
fish
has gone
too far
Tinned
fish
Tastewise is reporting a YoY growth of roughly 2.5% in social media posts about tinned fish.
Somewhere between the fifth ASMR mukbang and the eighteen-dollar Portuguese conserva, tinned fish stopped being a discovery and started being performance art.
The numbers tell the story of how we got here. Fishwife, the brand most responsible for turning a pantry staple into a personality, has grown roughly 9,900% since 2020, according to Time. In the UK, Tesco has logged an 18% jump in tinned tuna sales over two years — an extra 2.25 million kilograms of the stuff. The U.S. tinned fish market, worth $2.7 billion in 2023, is on pace to clear $11 billion by 2027. CNN went so far as to call rising tinned fish sales a recession indicator, the new lipstick index for people who still want to feel like they're treating themselves.
Open YouTube or TikTok now and the tin has become a genre unto itself: ASMR sardine mukbangs, "tinned fish date night" reels, haul videos stacking conservas like trading cards, creators cracking a lid in extreme close-up for the crunch and the oil-sheen shot. It's not that people are eating tinned fish. It's that eating tinned fish, on camera, has become the content — a repeatable, algorithm-friendly beat that platforms can serve forever, whether or not anyone involved actually likes fish.
Why Chefs Quietly Pay $27
for a Can of Clams
Somewhere in Cambados, in the cold months when the Galician water turns mean, somebody's out on the estuary raking cockles by hand — the same brutal, beautiful work their grandmother did. Los Peperetes puts eighty-five grams of them in a blue tin with garlic and good oil, charges you the price of a night out, and grades them backwards, because thirty fat ones humble seventy scrawny ones every time. Don't cook it. Don't plate it. Don't you dare photograph it. You peel back the lid at the counter, drink a cold beer, eat them off a toothpick, and for four seconds you understand something real — that the finest luxury on earth isn't caviar or some chef's tweezered nonsense. It's a small clam, done perfectly, by people who've been doing it right since long before you showed up.
GEMMA SPAM STORY
LEMON
WITH SARDINES
The oily, salty taste of tinned sardines is a match made in heaven for the acidic tang of the fresh lemon sliced on top of this delicious flatbread. Inspired by long summer lunches underneath Provençal plane trees, this is destined to be served with a chilled bottle of crisp rosé. Find the recipe here.
WATCH: The Billion Sardine Dance!
