Bay Area’s growing appetite for tiny fish

Is our love of these briny bites sustainable?

Tinned fish is having a moment. Not oldschool canned tuna or salmon, but artisanal selections of sardines and anchovies sealed in stylish packaging. Food lovers have become tinned fish aficionados, draping these two or three-bite fillets luxuriously atop pandemic sourdough toasts or handrolled pastas. For a couple years now, wine bars and restaurants, too, have gotten in on the trend, with locals like Anchovy Bar and Verjus offering plates that highlight the meaty salinity and savory punch of these little fish.

Half the attraction “is putting the most beautiful sardines or anchovies or tuna or whatever it may be in the can,” said Drew McConnell, cofounder of Conserva, an online shop specializing in tinned and jarred fish and highend pantry goods. “And then the other half ... is just how effortless and easy to enjoy it is.”

Beyond their cool factor, many fans note, there’s a feelgood aspect, too: sustainability. It’s a belief born of the idea that eating lower on the food chain is better, and that these fish are able to reproduce fast enough to create a nearly endless supply.

But while the taste and fashion aspects are undeniable, not all tinned fish are a sustainable option — the situation is more complicated. Sardines and anchovies do reproduce quickly, but their populations can be overfished to a point where it’s hard for them to rebound. An example of how this plays out is the sardine population in the Pacific Ocean off the western coast of North America, where U.S. commercial fishing of sardines has been closed since 2015.

“They’re not taking advantage of their options, optimal spawning and feeding behavior,” said David Demer, senior scientist and leader for the advanced survey technologies group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), speaking of the fish. “And that’s creating a negative feedback mechanism so that they’re not able to resurge.”

So is the answer to simply stop eating them? Well, not exactly. And that might be a tall order at a time when consumption has risen. As the pandemic hit in the first quarter of 2020, sales of shelf stable seafood (in cans and pouches) rose 53.4%.

People are not wrong to think it’s a more sustainable seafood option than popular species like salmon, shrimp and tilapia, which are often farmed in damaging conditions, or bigger fish like rockfish and swordfish, which are slower to reproduce and take years to grow to catchworthy size. It’s one reason why Stuart Brioza, who opened the Anchovy Bar in October, is highlighting these socalled forage fish, which are usually prey for larger species.

In many parts of the world, they often are caught in a lowimpact way, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, with purse seines, a net bag that pulls closed around a school. This method helps prevent trapping other species and requires less fossil fuels than dragging a heavy net around in the water.

At Verjus, which opened in May 2019, managing partner and wine director Matt Cirne pairs tinned fish with natural wine with sustainability in mind. “I think it’s a similar ethos,” he said, noting that he is careful to purchase responsibly fished products. “It’s sustainable. It’s exciting.”

But like the term “natural wine,” the word “sustainable” can be slippery; while there are good options out there, not all tinned fish are created equal. Seafood Watch, which works to improve fishing and aquaculture practices around the world, labels 15 of 17 types of sardines and 18 of 20 types of anchovies with its most restrictive rating: “avoid.”

Seafood Watch considers four factors when looking at wild fisheries, according to Ryan Bigelow, senior program manager: the health and quantity of the fish itself; how fishing methods affect other species in the area; whether catch limits are imposed and enforced in a way that will maintain a healthy population size; and whether fishing methods cause pollution or damage habitats such as reefs.

In the case of sardines, the size of the schools and opaque or poor fishery management are the primary concerns in most of the world. In some areas, bycatch (in which other species are caught unintentionally) and pollution are also issues.

“Of the four, management is the most likely to impact the other three criteria,” Bigelow said. “What may be sustainable one year could be unsustainable the next, making successful management that much more difficult.”

Overfishing is the primary threat to these socalled pelagic species — fish that swim in the middle depths of the sea. But that can’t all be blamed on the demand for tinned fish. A relatively small percentage of the total catch ends up on store shelves and restaurant tables. The rest is processed as feed for chickens and farmed fish, or used as bait for commercial and recreational fishing.

Science has shown that these fish have natural boombust cycles. In tracking the biomass of pelagic fish on the West Coast from British Columbia to Baja California, Demer of NOAA has observed some behavior that explains why populations in decline often stay in decline.

“The (sardines) were taking refuge in another school, presumably to avoid predation, when their numbers were smaller,” Demer said. “But that had an effect of causing their behavior to shift from their normal, optimal feedings, spawning strategies, to the behaviors of the other species.”

In other words, by trying to blend in with mackerel for protection, the sardines lose the ability to reproduce as quickly. When fishing continues after this cycle has started, it exacerbates the decline because the school doesn’t get a chance to rebound.

“Fish populations have shown time and again that when fishing pressure is reduced and strong management is in place, they can bounce back,” Seafood Watch’s Bigelow said.

The warming of the seas is also a factor. Ocean temperatures have risen an average of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1900, according to NOAA. That affects how much plankton is available for small pelagic fish to eat.

Conserva