Short Stuff: Sardines!

**Josh** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're just sucking down sardines and the short stuff, because Jerry's sitting in for Dave, which means it's short stuff. About sardines.

**Chuck** (0:15)
That's right. I picked this because a couple of weeks ago, you mentioned sardines because I mentioned I'd been eating tinned like salmon and tuna for light lunches.
You said, try sardines. I said, I got some sardines, and I tried them today, finally.

**Josh** (0:31)
Yeah?

**Chuck** (0:32)
And I have to say this, I liked, like the flavor was good, but I got skeeved out.

**Josh** (0:40)
Yeah, the same thing happens to me, man. I have zero recollection of telling you to try sardines, and I find them difficult to eat because of the texture.

**Chuck** (0:51)
You did not mention any of that when you told me to try sardines.

**Josh** (0:54)
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not kidding.

**Chuck** (0:57)
Last week or the week before.

**Josh** (0:58)
That is bizarre.

**Chuck** (0:59)
I think you're even like, sardines are good, go eat them.

**Josh** (1:02)
That sounds like me. But one part of my brain was saying it, and the rest of my brain didn't even know that I just said it.

**Chuck** (1:09)
Yeah, so the idea was to, I got some bagels when I was just in New York from my favorite, Essa Bagel.
Everything's, bring them home in the suitcase, put them in the freezer, cut them in half, put them in the freezer because eating a whole giant bagel like that is a lot. Oh yeah. I put a, like for lunch sometimes, I'll do a half a bagel with like, maybe sometimes nothing, just a half a bagel or sometimes I'll put some of that tinned tuna on top. So I was like, today I'm going to throw some sardines on that. But let me try them first. And I tried them and I'm glad I didn't waste that bagel because I couldn't do it, man. They skeeved me out. But the flavor was still fine. It was hard to describe why it skeeved me. I guess because they're tiny little fish looking at you.

**Josh** (1:47)
Well, that's the thing. Yeah, it's a whole little fish. They don't grind it up like tuna or salmon or anything like that. Like, it's a little fish in a tray, a metal tray.
That didn't skeeve me out. Again, it's the texture. The taste is fine. Like, they smell way more fishy than they taste and their taste is fine.

**Chuck** (2:06)
It wasn't unlike tuna taste-wise.

**Josh** (2:08)
No, it's no. And it's certainly nothing like anchovies, which are definitely their own thing and they're good in their own way. It's nothing like that.
I saw some recipes because I got into sardines before I ever tried them. And we still have cans left from years back, and I'm always looking for ways to use them up. And I found that you can just fry them up, like a Spanish tapas is to fry them. And I'm like, if they crisp up a little bit, I might be able to handle them better.

**Chuck** (2:39)
Agreed. And grilling them, had I maybe just placed them on that bagel and toasted it in the toaster oven, it might have been a little better. But yeah, I'm with you. So we're talking sardines. These are tiny little fish, of course, very silvery. They're very nutrient-dense, which we're gonna talk about, because they're actually pretty good for you. And you can get them, you know, you can get fresh sardines in a lot of Asian countries, usually over here in the United States and other places in the West. You're gonna buy them in the little, you know, your little bunk bed that you twist open.
I wish you still twisted open things like that with the little key, but unfortunately, it's the stupid pull tab now.

**Josh** (3:16)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (3:17)
But one benefit of a sardine, if you're into like a light tinned fish for lunch, is that you don't have to worry about mercury, because they don't eat other fish. And apparently that's where mercury comes from, is fish eating fish. They eat plankton, and so you don't have to sweat the mercury.

**Josh** (3:32)
Yeah, I saw the reason why it's a problem, because plankton actually have mercury in it, but it's very small amounts. The problem with eating fish with mercury is that it bioaccumulates. So one fish eats another fish that has mercury. That fish's mercury combines with the fish that ate its mercury and so on and so forth, so that by the time you eat a fish, you're eating a bunch of mercury potentially. Since sardines only eat a little bit of mercury that plankton have, they're fine.