I split my time between the west coast where I work and create, and the east coast where I spend time with my family.

Back east, everything is on the menu. I love my wife’s cooking. I love sitting down to a nice meal at the table with the kids. Everything is warm and delicious and wonderfully domestic.

I eat different out west. I live in a single room without a kitchen. Space is at a premium. I have limited opportunity for storage or refrigeration. I’m out here to write, to record, and to build community. I don’t have the money, time, or inclination to dwell on food.

Enter canned fish. I haven’t found a more efficient, cost-effective way to maintain my nutrition. I order tuna, sardines, and anchovies by the case. I eat them all with avocados and hot sauce, mashing the ingredients together into a really ugly, protein-dense guacamole. I’ll eat it with chips or spread it on a tortilla. Super good. I don’t get bored of it. And it’s jam packed with all the good proteins and fats we need to get by.

No refrigeration required. No special kitchen equipment. Just solid, efficient nutrition.

Do your own research, but you’ll find plenty of information about the benefits of oily fish for cardiovascular and even neurological health. But the interwebs aside, we have entire populations of people in the far north who had subsisted FOREVER on nothing but oily fish. I say “had” because modernity has changed this picture, and not for the better. The introduction of imported foodstuffs into the traditional diets of the Arctic’s indigenous people is an ugly parable. Abundance, we learn, can kill every bit as well as deprivation. It just takes longer.

This article also inspired me. Sometimes learning how other people in the world approach certain food items can reframe our own ideas of what is “good food.”

There are some concerns about mercury in the fish. This is a bigger issue for larger sea creatures that tend to concentrate these pollutants through their consumption of other tainted fish. Eating low on the food chain, as one does with sardines and anchovies in particular, is one way to minimize risk.

Any favorite recipes for canned sea animals?

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