The Fish That
Solved Distance.

Field Notes I, II, and III asked who tells the sardine’s present-day story, namely the podcaster, the brand, and the equity holder. This Field Note asks the older question. How did this small, oily, seasonal fish become a global commodity in the first place? The answer is roughly two thousand years long, runs through four different origins, and explains why the front of any modern can still rarely matches the country where ownership and financial returns are ultimately located.

Section 1What This Field Note Adds

Field Note I argued that the same sardine product class is sold in the United States under three radically different stories at radically different prices. Field Note II traced how a Filipino industrial brand layered national pride, a wellness certificate, and a charity programme on top of one tomato-sauce tin. Field Note III mapped who actually owns the global canned-sardine industry, and showed that for many of the most globally visible brands, the country printed into the product story is not always the country where ownership, listing, or financial returns are ultimately located.

This Field Note moves the camera back. Before the podcaster, the brand, and the shareholder, there were roughly two thousand years of preservation history that made any of those present-tense stories possible. The discipline of the series so far has been to read the can. The discipline of this essay is to read the centuries that made the can.

The argument is straightforward. The sardine has at least four different origins, namely the origin of the name, the origin of sardines as food, the origin of modern canning technology, and the origin of the canned sardine industry. Conflating them is the most common factual error in popular sardine writing. Sardinia did not invent canned sardines. Portugal did not invent canning. France did not invent the eating of small oily fish. Each origin belongs to a different century and a different system.

Each generation of preservation — salt, oil, glass, and tin — was an attempt to shorten the distance between coastal abundance and human need without moving the fish through space faster.

Section 2The Four Origins, on One Timeline

The first thing a careful reader needs is a single chart that separates the four origins. The figure below traces the sardine as a name, a food, a technology, and an industry, each on its own line, against the same scale. The horizontal distance between the leftmost and the rightmost milestone is roughly two thousand four hundred years.

Section 3Origin of the Name

The English word sardine appears in writing earlier than most popular sources state. The Oxford English Dictionary records its earliest evidence from 1382 in the Wycliffite Bible, with continuous use through the fifteenth century in cookery and trade contexts (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025). The word entered English from Middle French sardine, itself from Latin sardina and ultimately from Ancient Greek sardinê or sardinos.

The most often cited derivation traces these forms to Sardô, the Greek name for the island of Sardinia, around which the fish were once thought to be abundant. The Sardinia derivation is plausible but not certain. The lexicographer Ernest Klein argued that it is unlikely the Greeks regularly imported small fish from Sardinia at the early date when Aristotle mentions the fish sardinos. Other Sard- place names existed in the region, and the Greek word sarda became a general label for various pickled fish (Harper, n.d.).

The honest summary is that sardine probably traces back to the name of Sardinia, but the link is a folk-etymological tradition rather than a documented import route. The name itself tells us something useful, namely that small oily fish were associated, in the Greek and Latin imagination, with a particular Mediterranean place. The label travelled. The fish themselves did not have to.

Section 4Before the Can: Sardines as Ancient Coastal Food

Long before any tin existed, sardines and sardine-like small pelagic fish were a staple of Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal diets. Archaeological work on Roman and Gallo-Roman fish-salting infrastructure documents large brine tanks, known as cetariae, distributed along the Atlantic coasts of Iberia, southern France, and Brittany, including the well-studied installation at Plomarc’h on the Bay of Douarnenez (Sánchez et al., 2018; Sternberg, 2011). These tanks processed pelagic fish — including sardines, anchovies, and tunas — into salted products and into the fish sauce known as garum, in volumes well above local consumption needs.

By the late Middle Ages, sardine salting had become a meaningful Atlantic trade. Bordeaux notarial records and customs accounts from Nantes document barreled sardine exports from the Breton and Biscay coasts from roughly 1500 onward, with brine-cured “white” sardines and smoked “red” sardines moving through Atlantic networks (Tanguy, 1994; Musée d’histoire de Nantes, n.d.).

The reason sardines mattered before canning is structural. They are abundant when they appear, but they appear seasonally, in dense schools, near productive coastlines. They are oily, which means they spoil quickly. They are small, which means they cannot be filleted easily but can be processed in volume. They are nutritionally dense. They are also unevenly distributed in time and space, which makes preservation valuable and absence painful. Canning did not introduce sardine preservation. It transformed it.

Section 5What Counts as a Sardine?

The question is less obvious than it appears. Sardine is both a biological and a regulatory category, and the two do not always agree. The Codex Alimentarius standard for canned sardines and sardine-type products (CXS 94-1981, last revised 2018, with a 2024 amendment) lists more than twenty species across the genera Sardina, Sardinops, Sardinella, Clupea, Sprattus, Hyperlophus, Etrumeus, Ethmidium, Engraulis, and Opisthonema that may legally be canned and labelled as sardine-type products under specified rules (FAO & WHO, 2018).

The standard is precise about labelling. The unqualified word “Sardines” is reserved exclusively for Sardina pilchardus, the European pilchard. All other species must be labelled with a qualifier — “X sardines” where X is a country, geographic area, species name, or common name — in a manner that does not mislead the consumer. This regulatory elasticity has historical roots. When the European sardine fishery faltered in different periods, canners on different coasts substituted other small clupeids. North American canneries on the East Coast packed Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus). Norwegian producers used brisling sprat (Sprattus sprattus). The label outran the species, but the Codex regime now requires producers to indicate which species is in the can.

Field Note III named the consequence in equity terms, namely the gap between the heritage on the front of the can and the company that owns it. Section 5 names the consequence in biological and regulatory terms, namely the gap between the species in the can and the word printed on it. Distance is no longer only spatial. It is also informational.

Section 6The Science Behind the Fish

The reason the sardine became a global commodity is not only economic. It is also biological. The fish itself sits at a particular point in the marine food chain, has a particular size and life history, and produces a particular nutritional payload that other small pelagics do not match in the same combination. The figure below summarizes what a single 100-gram serving of “Fish, sardine, Atlantic, canned in oil, drained solids with bone” (USDA FoodData Central ID 175139) actually delivers, and why the sardine’s position low on the food chain is what makes it lower in mercury than the larger fish that prey on it.

Section 7Origin of Canning Technology: Appert and Durand

Nicolas Appert was a Parisian confectioner. He was not a scientist. He did not know about bacteria, because Pasteur’s germ theory would not arrive for another fifty years. He knew that if he heated food inside a sealed glass container long enough, it did not spoil. Between roughly 1795 and 1810, he worked out the conditions systematically in his shop in Massy, south of Paris, testing everything from vegetables and soups to meat and fish in glass bottles sealed with cork and wax (Appert, 1810; Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.-a).

In 1810, the same year Appert published his method and received the 12,000-franc prize the Napoleonic government had offered since 1795 for a workable food preservation system, the British merchant Peter Durand patented a tin-canister version of the same principle (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.-b). Durand appears never to have manufactured cans himself. His patent passed to Bryan Donkin and John Hall, who opened the first commercial canning factory in Bermondsey, London, in 1813, supplying the Royal Navy.

The sardine-specific innovation came from Joseph Colin, a Nantes confectioner and entrepreneur who opened what is generally recognized as the first industrial sardine cannery in 1824, at the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes (Cucarull, 2016; Musée d’histoire de Nantes, n.d.). Colin used olive oil rather than butter as the packing medium — a choice that proved decisive for flavour, shelf life, and the eventual premium identity of the sardine conserva. The 1824 Nantes cannery was commercially successful.

Section 8The Iberian Century: Portugal and Spain

The French sardine-canning industry grew rapidly in Brittany through the mid-nineteenth century, reaching an estimated 50 to 60 factories by the 1840s. But it was Portugal and Spain that turned canned sardines into a national industry, an export commodity, and eventually a heritage identity.

In Portugal, the earliest sardine canneries concentrated around Matosinhos, near Porto, and along the Algarve coast. Conservas Ramirez, founded in 1853 in Vila do Conde, is generally cited as the oldest continuously operating sardine cannery in the world (Conservas Ramirez, n.d.). By the early twentieth century, Portugal had an estimated 400 or more canneries, though figures vary by source; the Cordeiro (2014) study and the Pereira (2008) cultural heritage survey place peak estimates in the 350 to 500 range for different periods. The industry contracted sharply after the 1960s under pressure from cheaper North African and Asian competition, environmental regulation, and the decline of coastal sardine stocks.

In Spain, the Galician coast, particularly around Vigo, Pontevedra, and the Ría de Arousa, developed a parallel industry from the 1840s onward, with Galician sardine exports reaching markets in Latin America, Cuba, and the United States by the late nineteenth century (Carmona & Nadal, 2005).

Section 9Maine, Japan, and the Global Industry

The sardine-canning model crossed the Atlantic. The American sardine industry — which, under Codex labelling rules, actually packed Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) rather than pilchard — developed rapidly along the Maine coast from the 1870s onward. At its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Maine had more than 70 operational sardine canneries (Penobscot Marine Museum, n.d.). The last American sardine cannery, the Stinson cannery in Prospect Harbor, Maine, closed in 2010.

Field Note III named the consequence of that closure in ownership terms. The Bumble Bee / Beach Cliff complex that absorbed the Maine sardine brand history eventually passed to Taiwanese trading company FCF Co., Ltd. after US Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in 2019. The heritage is American. The equity is Taiwanese. The fish, sourced from multiple oceans, is neither.

Section 10The Can from Inside: Industrial Process

The industrial sardine can is a more carefully controlled object than its modest retail price suggests. The production sequence is tightly regulated by Codex CXS 94-1981 and national food-safety frameworks including HACCP and ISO 22000.

Sources. FAO & WHO (2018), Codex Alimentarius CXS 94-1981; FAO (2014), Assessment and management of seafood safety and quality, FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper 574.

Section 11Labour, Class, and the Hidden Work Inside the Can

Canned sardines were affordable in part because the labour inside them was cheap and largely female. The Breton canneries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed women in roughly three-to-one or higher ratios over men, with women performing the precision work of cleaning, sorting, frying, and packing while men worked the boats (Martin, 1994; Fichou, 2014).

The most studied moment in this labour history is the Penn Sardin strike at Douarnenez in Brittany. Beginning at the Carnaud can-making plant on 21 November 1924 and spreading across the town’s twenty-two canneries, several thousand cannery workers — predominantly women known in Breton as Penn Sardin — struck for several weeks against piece-rate wages and demanded an hourly rate, overtime pay, and union recognition (Martin, 1994; Crignon, 2023). The factory owners conceded most demands on 6 January 1925.

In the same year, Joséphine Pencalet was elected to the Douarnenez municipal council on a workers’ list, although her election was subsequently invalidated because women in France did not yet have the right to vote (Gautier, Guichard-Claudic & Bugnon, 2016). Her brief tenure remains a recognized moment in French feminist labour history.

This is the unglamorous economic truth of the sardine can. The low retail price reflected an organization of labour in which a primarily female workforce performed repetitive precision work for low wages, often seasonal, often without union protection until well into the twentieth century. Field Note III named the late-twentieth-century version of the same pattern, namely a category whose ownership has moved away from public equity into private holdings. The labour question did not disappear. It moved.

Section 12The Fish Itself: Stocks, Runs, and Limits

A history of the sardine that ends at the supermarket shelf misses the most important continuing chapter, namely whether there will continue to be sardines to can. Small pelagic fish are one of the largest categories of marine catch on Earth, and sardines sit at the centre of that category.

• U.S. Pacific sardine: The northern subpopulation off the U.S. West Coast was declared overfished by NOAA Fisheries in July 2019, and a directed commercial fishery has been prohibited since then. The 2025 stock assessment again classified the stock as overfished (NOAA Fisheries, n.d.; National Marine Fisheries Service, 2026).
• Mediterranean sardine: The 2025 FAO GFCM assessment found that fishing pressure has declined sharply over the past decade, but Mediterranean sardine specifically continues to show signs of biomass depletion under sustained historical exploitation (FAO GFCM, 2025).
• Brazilian sardine: Sardinella brasiliensis stocks have undergone repeated collapses and partial recoveries since the 1970s, with a renewed collapse around 2016 attributed to a combination of overfishing, recruitment failure, and ocean conditions (Schroeder et al., 2025).
• Moroccan sardine: The Moroccan sardine industry experienced a sharp decline in landings in the first half of 2024, which fed through directly into a substantial revenue decline at Casablanca-listed Unimer SA, as documented in Field Note III.

Section 13Five Small Facts the Can Does Not Say Out Loud

Most of what the sardine has done in human culture does not fit on a label. The five facts below surface in primary sources but rarely appear in food writing about sardines.

1. “Packed like sardines” is older in print than most readers think. The earliest documented appearances cluster in the 1840s. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction used a “packed up like sardines” formulation in 1841, and George Lippard’s 1845 Philadelphia novel The Quaker City used “packed together… like sardines in a tin-box” (Word Histories, 2024). The metaphor crossed languages quickly, with a French serrés comme des sardines attested in Paris print as early as 1822 (Word Histories, 2024).
2. The Marseille port was once “blocked by a sardine.” Local Marseille folklore claims that a sardine once blocked the entry of the Vieux-Port. The actual event was less colourful, namely that in 1779 a French ship named Sartine ran aground at the harbour entrance. The ship name slipped, the fish entered the joke, and the joke entered Marseille linguistic culture.
3. The Peruvian anchoveta is not biologically a sardine. Engraulis ringens is the largest single-species marine fishery on Earth by tonnage (FAO, 2024). It is biologically an anchovy. However, Codex CXS 94-1981 permits some Engraulis species to be canned and labelled as sardine-type products under specified labelling rules. Most anchoveta catch is in fact reduced to fishmeal and fish oil rather than canned for human consumption.
4. The “sardine stone” appears in the King James Bible. Revelation 4:3 in the 1611 KJV describes a throne flanked by “a jasper and a sardine stone.” The “sardine stone” is sard, a reddish-brown variety of chalcedony, named after Sardis in Lydia (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025). The same root that named the fish named the gemstone.
5. The hand-packed sardine is a deliberately small industry. Conservas Pinhais in Matosinhos, Portugal, founded 1920, still hand-packs every sardine in its NURI and Pinhais brands. Field Note III documented Pinhais among the four most globally visible canned-sardine brands and noted that it has never traded publicly. The most quietly authentic sardine on the global market is one of the only ones whose ownership cannot be bought.

Section 14From Cheap Can to Supermarket Product

The class perception of the sardine is not stable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was sailor food, soldier food, worker food, student food, migrant food, pantry food, and disaster food. In many parts of Europe and North America it acquired the cultural label of poor people’s food. The label was incomplete. It was also the food of explorers, navies, factory canteens, and twentieth-century militaries.

The same can sits at very different points on the social hierarchy depending on country and decade. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy the tin retains an artisanal and even premium identity. In the United States, the rise of so-called fancy tinned fish in the 2020s, documented in Field Note I, has reframed sardines as a gourmet and longevity product, often sold at margins that bear no clear relationship to the sodium-and-protein math on the back of the can.

The contemporary nutrition profile, summarized in Figure 2, is what made the rebrand possible. The honest position remains the one stated earlier, namely that the underlying nutrition is genuine, the mercury safety margin is genuine, and the word superfood has no fixed scientific meaning. Public-health guidance generally supports regular consumption of low-mercury fish as part of a balanced diet (FDA & EPA, 2024). Sardines fit that category, but no single food should be treated as a cure.

Section 15The Sardine Can as a World System

The sardine tin is, in the end, a small object that records a large world. It records the Greek and Latin habit of naming fish after places. It records the Mediterranean coastal economies that salted, dried, and fermented small oily fish for nearly two thousand years before any can existed. It records a Napoleonic state’s decision to use a cash prize to solve a logistics problem, and the curious fact that a confectioner with no scientific training found the answer. It records the British improvement that replaced glass with tin. It records a Breton confectioner who fed his sardines through olive oil instead of butter. It records the women of Brittany on the night shift, the Penn Sardin strikers, and the Portuguese cannery towns that turned tinplate into national identity.

It also records the things that are still unfolding. It records contemporary fisheries debates, namely whether sardine stocks can be managed against both fishing pressure and climate-driven environmental variability. It records the gourmet rebrand of tinned fish. It records the omega-3 health-claim economy. It records, as Field Note III documented, an ownership structure in which the heritage on the front of a can is frequently far from the country where ownership and equity returns are ultimately located.

The interpretive frame for this Field Note has been the sardine as a problem of distance. Distance from coast to interior. Distance from season to season. Distance from harvest to plate. Distance from a Mediterranean island to a Doha kitchen, a Lisbon picnic, a Manila merienda, a Maine pantry. Each preservation method — salt, smoke, oil, glass, and tin — was an attempt to shorten that distance without moving the fish through space faster. The sardine became a global commodity because it kept rewarding such attempts. It still does.

Section 16Limits and Ethics

Three limits of this Field Note should be stated clearly before anyone leans on it.

• This is a synthesis, not original archival research. The four-origin distinction draws on the Oxford English Dictionary, the Musée d’histoire de Nantes, Bécédia, the Penobscot Marine Museum, FAO and NOAA primary sources, and peer-reviewed labour and fisheries literature. Where sources disagree on dates or counts, this essay flags the discrepancy rather than choosing a single number.
• Sustainability claims are time-stamped. Sardine stock conditions change yearly. The figures in Section 12 reflect FAO, FAO GFCM, and NOAA assessments through 2024 and 2025. A reader landing on this essay in later years should consult current data before drawing conclusions about any specific stock.
• This is not investment, medical, legal, or trade advice. The author holds no positions in any company named in this series.

Section 17What Comes Next

This Field Note completes the historical layer of the Borlaug Scholar Field Notes series on sardines. Three follow-ups are planned, in order of priority.

1. The Origin Atlas Q3 2026 — an interactive web tool that lets a reader click on a country and read, in one panel, the four origins for the sardine in that country, namely the local name, the local food tradition, the local canning history, and the current ownership of the dominant local brand.
2. The Brand Owner Decoder Q3 2026 — the tool announced in Field Note III, which translates a brand name into ultimate parent, listing status, headquarters country, and acquisition history. The historical depth in this Field Note feeds the back end of the decoder.
3. The Health-Washing Decoder Coming soon — a companion tool that takes any food product’s marketing language and returns what the published evidence actually supports, with the omega-3 / sodium / mercury triangle for sardines as the worked example.

None of this changes whether sardines are food. Sardines are food. The fish on the shelf is a small oily fish with a documented nutrient profile and a centuries-old preservation tradition. What this Field Note adds is a longer view, namely the roughly two thousand years that made the can possible.