The colorful packages are trending on Tik Tok and Instagram, (#tinfish has 38.6 million views on the latter platform), with influencers touting high nutrient value, long shelf life and convenience. Cookbooks such as Tin to Table  by Anna Hezel and The Magic of Tinned Fish by Chris McDade feature tinned-fish recipes. In the United States, the tinned-fish industry has been valued at almost $9.5 billion, and a package of tinned fish can range in price from $8 to $27, depending on the brand and the fish species.

That can be a pricey can of sardines. Many brands claim the high price tag is due to their sustainable practices, but in a complex seafood system, that can mean something different for every brand. For each purveyor, sustainable practices can mean different methods of sourcing, canning and labeling tins; there is no universal standard for a product to be labeled as sustainable. 

For some purveyors of tinned fish, sustainability is about the carbon footprint. For others, it’s about recognizing the labor of the fishermen or utilizing bycatch, fish caught unintentionally when fishing for specific species or sizes of fish. “I really try to avoid the word ‘sustainable.’ Food systems are so extractive, to use [the term]) ‘sustainability’ is really complicated,” says Bryan Szeliga, owner of Fishtown Seafood in Philadelphia. 

Bryan Szeliga, owner of Fishtown Seafood in Philadelphia.

 Sara Hauman, chef and founder of the Tiny Fish Co. in Seattle, says she wanted to reduce her carbon footprint by sourcing local fish species and canning locally. Hauman uses bycatch and sells less-well-known species that are caught in the Pacific Northwest, including rockfish, geoduck and black cod. 

“I feel it’s a more responsible decision than throwing them overboard,” says Hauman. She sources her octopus from bycatch and says one 15-kilogram octopus can produce around 100 tins of octopus in butter with lemon and dill. Hauman develops the recipes herself and works with local fisherman and a local cannery to produce her tinned fish. “Historically, canned fish has been a cheap pantry staple, but I feel strongly that fish should be expensive because it is a fleeting food resource,” says Hauman, who wants consumers to view tinned fish as a gourmet item. 

But for every brand that is trying to be transparent, there are also purveyors that may not think twice about greenwashing a seafood product’s labels. “Perfection in labeling might not be possible. With that said, there is some level of responsibility that [seafood sellers] need to take if they want to make a profit off of buying and selling seafood,” says Szeliga, who adds that honest mistakes can be made in a complicated seafood industry. 

Sometimes, tinned fish can be mislabeled, as it was when he placed an order for squid ink and instead received cuttlefish ink. Cuttlefish are much harder to sustainably trace—that is, to know where and when they were caught and if they were ethically sourced. Szeliga says  there is simply not enough information on the stock status of cuttlefish, meaning whether they were overfished or not, and consumers will see the country of origin labeling as where it was processed, not where it is actually from. 

Szeliga has a critical eye for sourcing and wants consumers to be skeptical of labels. “Octopus can be caught in Morocco or Mauritania, but since it is processed in Spain or Portugal, it gets the country-of-origin label from where it is processed.” Szeliga says that aspects of catch composition, species, harvesting methods, transport means and using salt for moisture retention should be considered when discussing seafood sustainability.   

Conditions for fishermen are not always transparent and can be overlooked in the narratives around sustainable fish. “The ocean is a dangerous place—weather can turn bad in an instant and mistakes can be life-threatening when out in the open sea,” says Hauman. She encourages consumers to remember “wild-caught fish” means the fishing crew has risked their lives.  

The tinned-fish industry in Europe has been around for nearly two centuries, with market share continuing to grow. In 2021, it was worth an estimated $4.95 billion. European canneries often support smaller tinned-fish companies and brands that don’t produce at a high volume. In the United States, more canneries are on the West Coast, making it difficult for some purveyors to source fish locally with a low carbon footprint.

FANGST, a tinned-fish company based in Denmark, also uses bycatch, fishes in regional waters and maintains Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certifications. For MSC certification, the company must fish only healthy stocks, which can be fished for the long term, and must minimize impact on other species and the wider ecosystem. 

“The certifications need to be as transparent as they expect the seafood supply chain to be,” says Szeliga, who is concerned that certifications allow seafood companies to stay certified even when certain conditions lapse. He adds that while certifications have some value, finding compliance standards and company audits are often difficult for consumers. 

“It’s not good enough to say we are sustainable. We are open to work with even stricter certifications if they existed in our region,” says Martin Bregnballe, the founder of FANGST. Bregnballe says he hopes he will one day be able to label his tinned fish with the fisherman’s name, time of catch and the specific area where the fish was caught.

Bregnballe says he hopes that FANGST tinned fish such as baltic sprat and Norwegian sea herring will encourage people to eat more small fish that feed on plankton instead of eating predatory fish, which is better for the environment and provides more Omega-3 fatty acids (than eating predatory fish) instead of turning them into fishmeal and animal feed. “The huge local catch of ‘Brisling’ [sprat] is used for fishmeal. However, calculations show that if we eat the fish ourselves instead of feeding them to the pigs, we could cover one-third of Denmark’s protein needs by this catch alone.” 

As the tinned-fish industry grows, purveyors hope that transparency will help them stand out in a crowded marketplace. “As a chef, I would never write ‘house-made pasta’ on a menu and use dried pasta,” says Hauman. “Maybe I’m not the best business person, but it means more to be honest to consumers.”

The post Tinned Fish is Trending. But Can You Trust the Label? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Now, some experts in the field are saying it might be too late to prevent the mushroom from overtaking American forests. 

“You will never outrun a fungus ever. The fungus is going to win. We don’t even know what measures we are going to take to abate the quantity that’s out there. It’s either going to find balance or take over,” says Tavis Lynch, chairman of the cultivation committee for the North American Mycological Association. Lynch cultivates a wide range of mushrooms for retail sale on his farm in Cumberland, WI, and he says he initially spotted golden oysters in the forest in 2014. Lynch grew golden oysters for years, but once he saw them in the woods, he stopped growing them, even though they are a big draw for customers at farmers markets. 

“I didn’t want to be the guy who is responsible for the golden oyster. We had our strains sequenced, and they are not the strains that are the escapees,” says Lynch, who also authored the book Mushroom Cultivation. “Why did this one batch escape? That’s the big mystery.”

There are several theories and legends in the fungi community about how the golden oyster escaped; a fire on a commercial mushroom farm in Iowa, a flood of a mushroom farm in the Hudson Valley and a tornado on a farm in Ohio. Some armchair mycophiles suggested the golden oyster could be following the path of the Emerald Ash Borer through the United States because of how it thrives on dead wood. 

However, ecologists say the introduction of the golden oyster could have been something as simple as an improperly discarded mushroom grow kit or spent substrate that was left outside. 

Dr. Greg Thorn is a professor of Biology at Western University in London, ON, with a focus on carnivorous mushrooms. Thorn says that for early mushroom cultivators there wasn’t much consideration that the spores would escape. “If you crumble up the grow kit after it stops producing for you, it would likely be taken over by the molds and bacteria in the compost itself. But If you toss it out in a backyard as a lump, it may fool you and produce mushrooms outdoors.”

There are no clear guidelines on the disposal of mushroom grow kits and throwing it in the trash or compost is common practice. 

“At this moment, we don’t have any single narrative about how the golden oyster escaped into the wild. There are lots of stories,” says Dr. Anne Pringle, a professor of botany University of Madison, WI. Pringle’s lab focuses on changing biodiversity of nonpathogenic microbes, such as fungi moved by humans across Earth. “There is no well-documented data about the escape of the golden oyster, but even if something as small as a grow kit was left to mature outside, it can introduce the fungi to a new environment.”

Andi Bruce on a mushroom foray. Photography by Andi Bruce.

Many in the mycology community cite Andi Bruce’s master’s thesis as one of the strongest datasets for understanding the golden oyster introduction. In the summer of 2017, Bruce was on her weekly foray in the forests of La-Crosse, WI, hoping to fill her basket with chicken of the woods, hedgehog mushrooms, mulberries and raspberries, when she spotted a mushroom she had never seen in the wild. It was unmistakable; the golden oyster was growing wild. Bruce, a Master’s student at the University of Wisconsin, La-Crosse at the time, started posting online wondering if anyone else had also seen the clusters of golden oyster mushrooms in the forest. Bruce then began using whole-genome sequencing to gain insights into the introduction and spread of naturalized golden oysters in the United States. She analyzed 29 wild golden oyster mushroom specimens collected across six states and used six commercially cultivated isolates. Bruce found that some of the cultivated strains became the founders of the naturalized populations of golden oyster mushrooms but that the isolates of cultivated strains of golden oyster had no clear geographic pattern. “In other words, lots of people probably got their hands on the same or similar commercial strains, perhaps to grow them outdoors, and those golden oysters escaped multiple times over,” says Bruce. 

According to Pringle, there is currently no peer-reviewed study of the golden oyster mushroom. In 2022, the Pringle Lab began research on how the golden oyster can impact carbon cycles of the forest, which can contribute to climate change. 

As a white rot fungus, the golden oyster is a powerful decomposer of wood and often found growing on hardwood trees such as elm, oak and ash. Aishwarya Veerabahu, a PhD student studying impacts of the golden oyster at the University of Wisconsin, Madison says there is anecdotal evidence that the fungus can take down dead standing trees much faster (around 5 years) than native decomposing mushrooms, compromising essential habitats for insects and birds. Veerabahu’s dissertation will study the growing concern around how the golden oyster is displacing native North American oyster mushrooms and has the potential to outcompete other fungi and change forest ecosystems. 

“Humans have dropped a fungal bomb by bringing in a species that’s unknown to the area and unknown to the ecosystem,” says Melissa Klotka, president of the Wisconsin Mycological Society. “We encourage people to [forage] as much as they want when it comes to an invasive species like the golden oyster.” 

Those invested in better understanding the golden oyster have words of advice for at-home cultivators, whether cracking open a golden oyster grow kit or starting to cultivate from spawn and fruiting blocks. 

“Many people who would not consider it ethical to garden with invasive plants think it’s perfectly acceptable to let non-native mushrooms grow outside. If exotic mushrooms are placed outdoors, they will release spores into the air [that] escape into local forests,” says Pringle, who encourages small-scale cultivators to grow native fungi.

Photography by Shutterstock.

Researchers say it’s also important to be mindful of how you dispose of the fruiting blocks to avoid introducing non-native species into an environment. Thorn recommends that growing kits be limited to local and native species of fungi. When growing non-native species, see if there are sporeless varieties, such as a Japanese version of the Golden Oyster, which was created to prevent allergies. “Treat the spent grow-block as a biohazard—crumble finely and spread on lawn or in garden or in a composter. If you grow them in an apartment, break up the spent block and feed it to your worm composter,” says Thorn. 

Lynch adds that it would be wise not to grow certain types of oyster mushrooms near wood, including inside your house or on furniture because the spores can spread and cause problems down the line. 

Andi Bruce, who wrote her thesis on the mushroom, advises people to stay away from growing the golden oyster altogether. “For folks interested in growing mushrooms at home, I’d encourage them to propagate the native varieties of edible mushrooms already present in their area, rather than buying a grow kit online and risk introducing a non-native genotype.” 

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