Cannery Row Revival...Not Quite!

I had about the Cannery Row Sardine Company last year, and I was excited that at least someone in California was trying to take advantage of the sardine fishery off the California Coast and not just watching the entire catch being sent off to Asia. While I knew that the glory days of Cannery Row weren’t going to return anytime soon, - the sardines have been having too much fun since they moved to Peru - at least it now had some activity. I went to the company’s website and saw the round tuna-style can, and I remembered my contact in the Pacific Northwest Albacore Tuna industry telling me that there was no one in the U.S. who had the equipment to pack sardines in the rectangular tins. Actually, the traditional sardine tin has probably gone through a half dozen revisions since the last sardines were packed in this country. And even though the California Sardine Sardinops sagax, is not the same species as the European (aka Portuguese) Sardine Sardina pilchardus, at least they were ours, and I wouldn’t have to worry about all of the sourcing and counterfeiting games that were going on in the canned sardine industry these days - 21 different species of small fish can be canned and sold as ‘sardines.’

Then this past weekend I was in Whole Foods, and I stopped to see what brands of canned tuna they were carrying, when I noticed Wild Sardines in extra-virgin olive oil from Wild Planet, and on the box it read “SUSTAINABLY CAUGHT ALONG THE CALIFORNIA COAST.” My initial surprise turned to excitement as I scanned and could not find a “pack in some foreign country” anywhere on the box. The fact that they were in a rectangular can didn’t make me suspicious at the time; I just assumed that Wild Planet saw enough of a future revenue stream to invest in new equipment. The price though, $2.49, did make me suspicious since it was less than 40% of the price of the Cannery Row Sardines, as did the fact that they were ‘smoked.’ Maybe California's Cannery Row was on the way back. I planned to do a comparative tasting between the Wild Planet and the Cannery Row Sardine Company sardines with a number of the European brands. That is until the shoe dropped and my initial concerns about the Wild planet sardines were confirmed! The tasting is still on, but…the answers to this and other annoying canned sardine issues after tomorrow’s tasting.