How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:17)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:21)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
Joe, as you know, although you sometimes forget.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:26)
You love fish.
If there's one thing I know about you, Tracy, you love fish. You love seafood, right? That's where you were going, right?

**Tracy Alloway** (0:36)
That's exactly it. All right. Famously, some people, some long-term Odd Lots listeners will have heard this story before. But the first time Joe ever invited me over to his house, he asked if I had any dietary restrictions. And I said something like, I eat everything, but I'm not a big fish person.
And then I went over to his house and was promptly served poke bowls.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:58)
Yeah. Sorry about that.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:59)
It's all right. They're actually really good. And I do eat fish on occasion. I'm just not that big into it. Like I eat crab cakes, oysters. I just have to be in the right mood for fish.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:08)
I get it.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:09)
One thing I have never eaten though, is sardines.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:13)
Oh, yeah. I've had sardines. I like them.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:17)
Yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:17)
I don't know if I have like a straw.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:18)
Do you just like take them out of the can and just stick them in your mouth like that?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:22)
I think I have or I'll put them in a salad or something like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. She's a salad with sardines. You know what? I've definitely taken sardines and just taken one out of a can and eaten it for sure.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:32)
Okay. Well, I personally don't eat fish.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:35)
That's not your thing.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:36)
Don't eat a lot of fish because of the taste, but it turns out it's becoming a pretty convenient distaste to have because we are now facing a sardine shortage.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:46)
When we talk about tinned fish, it intersects with a bunch of interesting things that we talk about all the time or that come up. So it's like global supply chains generally. I think I've said this a couple of times on the podcast, but one factoid that I very remember from our trip to Alaska is how much fish is caught off the shores of Alaska. It's sold in the United States, but first it takes a detour to China. That's right.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:13)
So even if you buy US caught Alaskan salmon, the chances are it's probably been processed through China.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:19)
Yeah, I find that to be really interesting. I find the sort of marketing of fish and the sort of branding, because one thing that we know about Tinned Fish, especially over the last five years, is there's a whole new demographic that doesn't just associate it with the cheap sun kissed or no, star kissed tuna or whatever that brand was, either the sort of low end tuna that emerged, this high end premium version of canned tuna, which I really like canned tuna, that's emerged. So there are all these sort of different market things, and then you mentioned climate and some of the questions about supply and fish stocks, et cetera. There are many different intersecting stories of the canned fish story.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:01)
Yeah, and the big news right now is that Morocco, which apparently exports something like 50% of the world's sardine supply, has imposed a ban on sardine exports because of, again, sighting reports, overfishing. Apparently, there's not enough plankton either to feed the little sardines, which is sad because it means that penguins also don't... Penguins not in Morocco, but penguins elsewhere in the world also don't have enough to eat. So we're going to talk about all these things. We're going to talk about what's actually going on with the world's sardine supply, where sardines come from, where fish in general comes from, how it gets processed, what makes a good tinned fish versus a bad tinned fish. And I'm happy to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Becca Millstein. She is the founder and CEO of Fishwife, which of course specializes in exactly that, tinned fish. And Becca, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. I have to say, when I finally eat my first sardine, I think it will be a Fishwife sardine.

**Becca Millstein** (4:04)
Can't wait for that day, Tracy. I truly can't. Thank you so much for having me.

**Tracy Alloway** (4:08)