> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
When a fishery crashes, it is dramatic and takes a long time to recover if ever. There's been plenty of fisheries like cod that one could not conceive being depleted but it has been now for decades.
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
Yes, seen this happen in Tasmania, Australia with crayfish, scallops and orange roughy. Each went from free-for-all to highly managed quotas within a few years. Roughy fishing stopped completely back then, don't know what the status is now.
> we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population
Absolutely yes. Orange roughy is a good example - it was caught by trawlers when they were massed in huge balls near the surface. Easy to get a big catch quickly. Turns out this was when they were spawning, so breeding cycle was being interrupted, which led to catastrophic declines very quickly.
My understanding is that the cod fishery decline in Atlantic waters has had limited recovery because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species. The wikipedia page mentions 'trophic cascade' so larger populations of prey species but does not mention the shark takeover. Either way cutting the harvesting won't bring the fish back.
That's the scary part. By the time the data is unambiguous enough for everyone to agree the stock has collapsed, you're already dealing with the collapse rather than preventing it
It's a terrible picture almost everywhere you look.
The Antarctic krill population is facing a similar decline due to influencer marketing (promoting Krill as a superior omega 3 supplement). Sardines and Krill are the foundation of the entire oceanic food ecosystems. This is not good.
As terrible as the influencer scourge is for society, I somehow doubt that it was a 3 day social media fad a couple of weeks or months ago caused the collapse of ocean wildlife.
That's what happened to the Atlantic cod fishery. The biologists kept warning of collapse, the relevant regulators didn't want to piss off the fishermen, and didn't institute necessary restrictions, and then the fishery collapsed.
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
You might consider how hunter-gatherers (probably) ate all the mammoths, and other elephant-alikes, and the giant kangaroos. I mean capitalism isn't crucial to making humans immoderate although I suppose it gets them better boats.
The book "not the end of the world" by Hanna Ritchie makes a neat point that humans have never lived in what we would call a sustainable way, but it's possible for this generation to be the first one that does.
The oceans are depleted. And some countries with shadow fleets are to blame more than the others. But somehow it’s not even a small priority for most countries. Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left. The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
There’s really no cause to raise a panic with lab-grown meat right around the corner. AI, FSD, electric cars, nuclear energy, and drones are eating up most of the VC money right now but lab-grown meat is waiting in the wings to take over in the next few decades.
Why lab meat? Plants are right here now, require very little electricity, the sun is free, they can't run away, many can be eaten with very little preparation. It's both cheap and easy.
Because not everyone shares your preference and/or discipline for plants. Lab grown meat doesn't require a planetary scale realignment of moral values and habits.
Some might argue that ignorance or apathy doesn't reduce someone's participation as a consumer in a very inhumane and climate-wrecking meat industry down to simply "preference". I do agree it's unrealistic to expect 8 billion people to change their habits overnight, but we are going to see a massive prisoner's dilemma as resources dwindle until that 8 billion number starts falling.
Various plants (dark leafy greens/cruciferous vegetables) do make up the foundation of a healthy diet, but do not provide significant protein or fats. Meat is very useful from a dietary perspective. You can make a quality vegan/vegetarian diet, but hitting high protein goals for those who are active can be difficult. The majority of vegetarian+ protein options are also high in carbs.
Plus, meat is tasty. It makes perfect sense people look forward to lab-grown variants that are ethically sourced and have no adverse health effects.
"Lab" grown meat of the aquatic variety has been around for eons in the form of mussels and other bivalves. No central nervous system to suffer, similar nutritional profile that fills in plant-based gaps, extracts nutrients from the water instead of polluting it, and grown on ropes.
However the concern here is not just finding something tasty for humans to eat.
I had to make an account to tell you to look again; lab-grown meat isn't at all a given or even a good alternative. 98% reduction in biomass in twenty years isn't a cause for alarm?
What a sad world we live in :(
Social medias have such a significant impact all over the planet, from overcrowded tourist spots dedicated to taking instagram pictures, to canned sardines diets.
Why do people fall for this kind of thing ? I still can't understand it. Is it all just an ego war ? That worries me
Recent episode of the Odd Lots podcast, "How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can":
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
This is bizarre to me. Do you always shop this way? Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it. There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands.
> "Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it."
Two responses:
1) And by what process exactly do you find a favorite? Clairvoyance?
2) If you can have a favorite, then the different brands must have different qualities. And if different brands have different qualities, then they will be differently good for different uses.
> "There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands."
They aren't the same thing. They're differently-prepared multi-ingredient products. They're often not even the same species of fish, because "sardine" is a general category not a species.
Plenty in Ireland as well. The craze certainly seems to be more subdued here, though some of the posh delis in Dublin, in particular, seem to be riding the wave. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/CannedSardines/comments/1o9dhlg/any... , for any Dublin tin-hunters.)
Could be regional, or something specific to TJs. My local Fred Meyer in Oregon has plenty of availability right now. Though the prices are a little bit inflated.
Destroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
The world reached peak fish catch in the mid-90s. [1] And we now eat more grown fish than caught fish. The problem is that with increased acidity in the oceans, as part of the ocean absorbing mor CO2, we get less algae and eventually less fish. [2] But, yeah, let’s keep fishing until the stocks collapse. [3] They take a very very long time to recover.
What makes it even more ridiculous is that one could think grown fish are a fine solution over-fishing.
But it turns out, many fish farms use caught fish for (part of) the fishmeal and fish oil used to feed the fish they grow. Because many fish we eat turn out to be pescetarian.
Ocean acidification is much more complex than "less algae and less fish." In fact some algae and bacteria will have giant blooms partly as a result of that, warming, and Nitrogenous runoff. Giant blooms consume oxygen in the primary marine trophic levels, causing die-offs that liberate more nutrients, leading to hypoxic and even large anoxic zones. You also have the concern that acifification can lead to (at first) worse outcomes for organisms depending on carbonates, and eventually (potentially) their extinction.
All of this assumes that we have a pretty solid understanding of what this system looks like as we wrench it from one feedback loop into another, but it's the best we've got.
I once saw a fascinating TV program about fishing quatos that were first introduced for the North Sea in the 1970s. It led to a war between Dutch government inspectors and fishermen.
Thirty years later everyone involved agreed that it had saved the industry.
Nobody is going to be elected telling people the harsh truth: that we consume far too much than the planet can sustain.
Farmers and fishers on top of that will always get cross partizan sympathy.
People just don't want to hear that the way they eat impacts and stresses the planet beyond its limits and that the producers of food get in any way penalized.
Truth is that we desperately need carbon taxes asap, to at least slow down the planet destruction. But it will never be popular.
The problem is we have no way to pass a global carbon tax, and the way the global economy works now any attempts at a national level will only succeed in moving the carbon generation to other countries.
AFAICT Germany actually came fairly close to assembling a club but failed because they wanted a club that would include the US but excluded China but couldn't find a reasonable mechanism to include the US. We should try again -- most countries would have no qualms about assembling a club that would exclude the US.
You just have to tax on import and un-tax on export.
Or directly tax the things that cause it: Tax all non-biofuel petrol a certain amount instead of trying to calculate how much CO2 was emitted in its production.
Given that the politicians are making a billion dollars on crypto scams, being gifted multimillion-dollar airplanes, and recipients of gold crowns, I’ll eat whatever I want regardless of who is elected.
The truth is that if we weren’t burdened with multi billionaires, we would have plenty of everything.
The problem is multifaceted, because we not only aren't told the truth, we are told lies that make things even worse, and people seem to like those.
For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected. Either democracy has broken beyond repair, or humanity averages to dumb. I'm inclined to the latter, because I believe that every individual, even if they can do smart things, is very dumb in other things.
>For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected.
Are you from the 1800s? Malthusianism has been discredited for decades, thanks to the green revolution and falling fertility rates. Not to mention all politicians that tried to do something (ie. didn't "ignore the problem") have a sorry track record - eugenics, one child policy, or forced sterilizations.
I don't believe they are talking about malthusianism. That's a straw man. The arguement is that the sheer number of people is causing damage to the natural environment, not that we can't grow enough food to feed people.
I don't care about doctrines, I'm only in favor that politicians let birth rates naturally decline as people try to give better lives to fewer kids, and themselves. My grandparents had a dozen kids, my parents had three, I had zero. That's good for the planet, and the economy can take it with proper preparation.
Infinite growth, in any form, is a fairy tale for economists.
I don't really follow this logic on two accounts. First is that when you remove yourself from the gene pool what you're effectively doing is simply ensuring that a larger percent of the children of the next generation come from families whose values you'd probably find quite distasteful. And their children will also end up holding those values at a high rate. This means that in the future 'your' values will have less influence and 'their' values will have more. This effect is going to be much greater than any sort of resource consumption reduction on what happens to the planet in the future.
The second is that the status quo on Earth is never sustainable. For but one example among many on this note, Earth has gone through multiple mass extinctions - long before humans arrived on the scene - and it will continue to do so; in fact we're rather overdue for one. So the idea of living in perpetual harmony with the planet sounds like a nice goal, but is itself also a fairy tale. This certainly isn't an argument to just YOLO away the Earth, but rather that doing things that are relatively self destructive for the sake of trying to achieve a perpetual harmony is unwise, because that goal is impossible to achieve.
> overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected
Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
Most developed societies. When you live by subsistence agriculture, having lots of kids is a benefit as they are free labor. When a culture urbanizes and industrializes, they are less of a benefit.
It's most societies, period. Of the 237 nations and territories recognized by UN, only 42% had a sustainable fertility rate. [1]
It seems reasonable to assume kids having more positive economic power in the past played a significant role, but there's counter-examples abounds in modern times. Nigeria is heavily urbanized yet has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Or on the other end of the spectrum, Thailand has a very large chunk of people living off farming, yet has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
Populations can grow, even rapidly, in the short run even with collapsed fertility. This is because in part it's a lagging metric, but more importantly (and less intuitively) because fertility also determines the age ratios within a society. Imagine a society has a common fertility rate of 1 then that means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. So if there's 1 new born, then there's 2 20-40 year olds, 4 40-60 year olds, and so on. High fertility rates result in societies with far more younger than elderly populations, and vice versa for low fertility societies.
In the past most societies had high fertility rates, which means there are relatively few elderly, relative to younger people, today. So the global death rate is relatively low as the the number of people annually exiting the stage is relatively low. But when low fertility generations start to die off, this gets turned upside down. You'll have large numbers of elderly dying off, and they'll make up the majority of the population. But this only happens ~80 years after the birth of the low-fertility generation.
This is why Japan looks so catastrophic today even though their fertility rate is much higher than places like South Korea. They've had a mediocre fertility rate since the 60s which then went into collapse in the 70s. By contrast South Korea had a fertility rate of 6 in the 60s, and didn't fall below replacement until the 80s. So Japan has had a solid decade or two head start. The fact we still aren't at the life expectancy of the first below replacement generation in Japan also means today is still going to be seen as 'the good ole days' for them. And this is where most countries are headed.
It is part of the politician's job to educate and form the opinions of the populace. Lately politicians have just figured out that instead of nurturing opinions that are good for society as a whole it is more effective to nurture opinions that increase their chances of reelection.
> It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
One of the major roles of elected officials is to take responsibility for what's happening, that's the major point of representative democracy. People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older than 7.
Not to mention that in the real world, all candidates are equally disinterested in the lives of people or fish. It doesn't matter who people vote for.
> If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job, they all promise good things but never deliver and keep blaming the guy before them instead.
> People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older that 7.
Authority and responsibility inherently and unalterably lie with the people; that they either by explicit delegation or tacit toleration allow others to exercise power on their behalf does not relieve them of either. This is the basic thing that everyone ought to understand.
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
He was wrong. Animals don't "instinctively" reach a natural equilibrium when they're introduced to a new environment. They eat all the available food, die off en masse, and repeat, until the food sources which were vulnerable have all gone extinct and the only things left are able to survive.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
Canned sardines have been a staple of my diet since I was in the womb. I can’t wait for this trend to die off, it has been so difficult to find them lately. I mean I understand all of the reasons for it, and I can at least appreciate that sardines are the most sustainable form of fishery we have, but goddamn it is super frustrating.
I haven’t noticed this at my local Costco in Northern California (plenty in stock this week) but maybe I will next week with this making the news. I usually wait to stock up when it goes on sale but I only eat two cans a week.
We have apparently reached the stage of the attention economy where even sardines can experience a demand shock because someone branded eating only one food for three days as a "diet"
This is only going to get worse with AI and not just for food recommendations. Think "where do I go for a vacation" and then the recommendation is pretty much the same for everyone, and you end up in overcrowded places because everyone else got the same advice.
Just came from a 2 week vacation in Portugal, they even had their own fancy (and very colorful) shops where they only sold canned sardines. Never seen such a range of products.
If we're going to continue to eat sea food, isn't plankton some of the best to eat? It's basically as low on the trophic chain as you can go, unless people start developing a taste for krill I guess.
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting went from viable to being outlawed --- I was worried that my children might live in a time when commercial fishing ceases to be tenable, but now that seems a near certainty.
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
So I've been thinking about this. It's more general than social media and sardines.
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
99% percent of times „I‘m trying the vital X“ is said it‘s an influencer getting paid to advertise X. Most of the times without saying it’s an ad. And this language accesses the most important good in today’s world: people’s attention.
That's why any attempt to ban advertising would only make it go more underground and harder to detect. No matter how strict the rules, people will find a way. Advertising is vital to competing businesses.
> As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds.
I got curious about this and found a lot of people in older threads saying that farming sardines can't be done. Apparently small schooling fish are typically very difficult to farm because they're pretty fragile and easily stressed.
Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.
People repeat this thing about satiation but it's not really true. In fact, the most highly satiating food is potatoes. Fish is quite high up there, but other "protein" foods like meat, eggs and cheese are nowhere near the top. Oats and many fruits like apples are higher.
The really stupid thing about fad diets like keto is you either just start craving carbs because food is miserable without them, or you develop an eating disorder. The only thing anyone should do is eat normal, delicious, home-cooked food made from mostly plants.
The numbers in question are quite wild[0]
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
0: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainabilit...
When a fishery crashes, it is dramatic and takes a long time to recover if ever. There's been plenty of fisheries like cod that one could not conceive being depleted but it has been now for decades.
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
Yes, seen this happen in Tasmania, Australia with crayfish, scallops and orange roughy. Each went from free-for-all to highly managed quotas within a few years. Roughy fishing stopped completely back then, don't know what the status is now.
> we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population
Absolutely yes. Orange roughy is a good example - it was caught by trawlers when they were massed in huge balls near the surface. Easy to get a big catch quickly. Turns out this was when they were spawning, so breeding cycle was being interrupted, which led to catastrophic declines very quickly.
My understanding is that the cod fishery decline in Atlantic waters has had limited recovery because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species. The wikipedia page mentions 'trophic cascade' so larger populations of prey species but does not mention the shark takeover. Either way cutting the harvesting won't bring the fish back.
That's the scary part. By the time the data is unambiguous enough for everyone to agree the stock has collapsed, you're already dealing with the collapse rather than preventing it
Seems like a pattern with environmental problems.
[delayed]
We need to restart oceanic iron fertilization!
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/24479
I can imagine fishermen noticing the change long before it showed up as an empty shelf at a supermarket
I'm an IT professional and noticed that memory went scarce from looking at the shelves.
You don't catch memory for a living.
It's a terrible picture almost everywhere you look.
The Antarctic krill population is facing a similar decline due to influencer marketing (promoting Krill as a superior omega 3 supplement). Sardines and Krill are the foundation of the entire oceanic food ecosystems. This is not good.
> ...decline due to influencer marketing...
As terrible as the influencer scourge is for society, I somehow doubt that it was a 3 day social media fad a couple of weeks or months ago caused the collapse of ocean wildlife.
That's what happened to the Atlantic cod fishery. The biologists kept warning of collapse, the relevant regulators didn't want to piss off the fishermen, and didn't institute necessary restrictions, and then the fishery collapsed.
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
Some enterprising entrepreneur will realise there are still 27,547 metric tons left to sell, and capitalism will be saved!
You might consider how hunter-gatherers (probably) ate all the mammoths, and other elephant-alikes, and the giant kangaroos. I mean capitalism isn't crucial to making humans immoderate although I suppose it gets them better boats.
The book "not the end of the world" by Hanna Ritchie makes a neat point that humans have never lived in what we would call a sustainable way, but it's possible for this generation to be the first one that does.
The Māori ate all the Moa before Europeans showed up, and they had some pretty damn good boats before capitalism.
Not disagreeing or anything, just thought it was a funny anecdote.
There's some kind of tacit ideological downvote gunfight going on in this thread. Run for cover!
Capitalism is just one form of "let people with power use that power freely to accumulate more power", which never ends well.
But the alternative "overthrow power" is costly enough that we usually procrastinate.
https://imgur.com/all-these-photos-were-taken-on-same-dock-a...
The oceans are depleted. And some countries with shadow fleets are to blame more than the others. But somehow it’s not even a small priority for most countries. Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left. The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
The tragedy of the commons, on a planetary scale.
Yeah, the enforcement problem seems almost absurd compared to the scale of the ocean
Which countries are using shadow fleets?
China, North Korea, Russia
There’s really no cause to raise a panic with lab-grown meat right around the corner. AI, FSD, electric cars, nuclear energy, and drones are eating up most of the VC money right now but lab-grown meat is waiting in the wings to take over in the next few decades.
Why lab meat? Plants are right here now, require very little electricity, the sun is free, they can't run away, many can be eaten with very little preparation. It's both cheap and easy.
Because not everyone shares your preference and/or discipline for plants. Lab grown meat doesn't require a planetary scale realignment of moral values and habits.
Some might argue that ignorance or apathy doesn't reduce someone's participation as a consumer in a very inhumane and climate-wrecking meat industry down to simply "preference". I do agree it's unrealistic to expect 8 billion people to change their habits overnight, but we are going to see a massive prisoner's dilemma as resources dwindle until that 8 billion number starts falling.
Various plants (dark leafy greens/cruciferous vegetables) do make up the foundation of a healthy diet, but do not provide significant protein or fats. Meat is very useful from a dietary perspective. You can make a quality vegan/vegetarian diet, but hitting high protein goals for those who are active can be difficult. The majority of vegetarian+ protein options are also high in carbs.
Plus, meat is tasty. It makes perfect sense people look forward to lab-grown variants that are ethically sourced and have no adverse health effects.
They don’t taste the same though
can't run away, fantastic
"Lab" grown meat of the aquatic variety has been around for eons in the form of mussels and other bivalves. No central nervous system to suffer, similar nutritional profile that fills in plant-based gaps, extracts nutrients from the water instead of polluting it, and grown on ropes.
However the concern here is not just finding something tasty for humans to eat.
I had to make an account to tell you to look again; lab-grown meat isn't at all a given or even a good alternative. 98% reduction in biomass in twenty years isn't a cause for alarm?
What a sad world we live in :( Social medias have such a significant impact all over the planet, from overcrowded tourist spots dedicated to taking instagram pictures, to canned sardines diets. Why do people fall for this kind of thing ? I still can't understand it. Is it all just an ego war ? That worries me
Recent episode of the Odd Lots podcast, "How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can":
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-a-sardine-gets-fro...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqP18fQi_CM
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-a-sardine-gets-from-the-o...
Where can't you find them?
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
I can't find what I want for sardines in Ohio.
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
Yea this article is trash. I can find canned sardines anywhere in Canada here right now. They're in stock on Amazon.ca for goodness sake.
Where are you? I am in BC and can’t find them in grocery stores
You don't have Amazon in BC?
No, there aren't any Amazon grocery stores in BC.
TFA explains why sardines sourced from around USA, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are harder to come by.
Where are your sardines be sourced?
Looking in my cupboard right now:
Goya: Spain
Bela: Portugal
Crown Prince: Morocco
Bar Harbor: Latvia
Brunswick: Latvia
King Oscar: Norway
This is bizarre to me. Do you always shop this way? Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it. There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands.
> "Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it."
Two responses:
1) And by what process exactly do you find a favorite? Clairvoyance?
2) If you can have a favorite, then the different brands must have different qualities. And if different brands have different qualities, then they will be differently good for different uses.
> "There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands."
They aren't the same thing. They're differently-prepared multi-ingredient products. They're often not even the same species of fish, because "sardine" is a general category not a species.
I didn't know that Amazon.ca was a supermarket with shelves. TIL.
Canned fish are tiny now compared to 5 years ago. They shrank to bait size.
I don't think they're any smaller now than they were before. You may be comparing different species of fish that are all called "sardines".
Which makes me wonder how geographically uneven this "shortage" actually is
Same here in slovenia, from fancy one to cheap store brand ones. No fads here
Plenty in Ireland as well. The craze certainly seems to be more subdued here, though some of the posh delis in Dublin, in particular, seem to be riding the wave. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/CannedSardines/comments/1o9dhlg/any... , for any Dublin tin-hunters.)
In US I haven't seen them for months at Trader Joe's. Usually they stock 3 different kinds.
Could be regional, or something specific to TJs. My local Fred Meyer in Oregon has plenty of availability right now. Though the prices are a little bit inflated.
I literally just left a Trader Joe’s and I couldn’t find a single tin
Destroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
https://balticwaters.org/en/baltic-sea-brief-60-the-final-he...
The world reached peak fish catch in the mid-90s. [1] And we now eat more grown fish than caught fish. The problem is that with increased acidity in the oceans, as part of the ocean absorbing mor CO2, we get less algae and eventually less fish. [2] But, yeah, let’s keep fishing until the stocks collapse. [3] They take a very very long time to recover.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aqua...
[2] https://www.ioc.unesco.org/en/articles/ocean-acidification-t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
What makes it even more ridiculous is that one could think grown fish are a fine solution over-fishing.
But it turns out, many fish farms use caught fish for (part of) the fishmeal and fish oil used to feed the fish they grow. Because many fish we eat turn out to be pescetarian.
Yes. And that foodstock is often either processed bycatch from unmanaged fisheries somewhere in the world - or industrial scale processed sardines.
Ocean acidification is much more complex than "less algae and less fish." In fact some algae and bacteria will have giant blooms partly as a result of that, warming, and Nitrogenous runoff. Giant blooms consume oxygen in the primary marine trophic levels, causing die-offs that liberate more nutrients, leading to hypoxic and even large anoxic zones. You also have the concern that acifification can lead to (at first) worse outcomes for organisms depending on carbonates, and eventually (potentially) their extinction.
All of this assumes that we have a pretty solid understanding of what this system looks like as we wrench it from one feedback loop into another, but it's the best we've got.
I once saw a fascinating TV program about fishing quatos that were first introduced for the North Sea in the 1970s. It led to a war between Dutch government inspectors and fishermen.
Thirty years later everyone involved agreed that it had saved the industry.
Nobody is going to be elected telling people the harsh truth: that we consume far too much than the planet can sustain.
Farmers and fishers on top of that will always get cross partizan sympathy.
People just don't want to hear that the way they eat impacts and stresses the planet beyond its limits and that the producers of food get in any way penalized.
Truth is that we desperately need carbon taxes asap, to at least slow down the planet destruction. But it will never be popular.
The problem is we have no way to pass a global carbon tax, and the way the global economy works now any attempts at a national level will only succeed in moving the carbon generation to other countries.
We actually do have a relatively reasonable way to pass a mostly global carbon tax; Nordhaus won a Nobel Memorial Prize for this plan: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001
AFAICT Germany actually came fairly close to assembling a club but failed because they wanted a club that would include the US but excluded China but couldn't find a reasonable mechanism to include the US. We should try again -- most countries would have no qualms about assembling a club that would exclude the US.
You just have to tax on import and un-tax on export.
Or directly tax the things that cause it: Tax all non-biofuel petrol a certain amount instead of trying to calculate how much CO2 was emitted in its production.
In Germany we tried that, politicians like that got very strong mandate to lower emissions.
First we tried diesel gate.
Then someone had amazing idea to import Russian gas.
Now we are catching and taxing cow farts! Maybe bio methane could generate electricity!!!
Cow burps and farts are like 20% of global warming. The phraseology is used to make it sound silly but it's not silly.
I find it unlikely that increased taxation should improve the situation.
If your burgers and steaks cost considerably more you may consider more poultry or cheese.
You don't think that taxes reduce consumption?
increase food prices substantially - people eat less - food production should become less profitable and shrink. Pretty easy taxation effect?
Now, keeping the taxes suitably high as citizens go hungry, that's an exercise for the reader.
Given that the politicians are making a billion dollars on crypto scams, being gifted multimillion-dollar airplanes, and recipients of gold crowns, I’ll eat whatever I want regardless of who is elected.
The truth is that if we weren’t burdened with multi billionaires, we would have plenty of everything.
Even if you removed all the billionaires this is unsustainable.
Then perhaps it would be prudent to act to remove them and seize their capital.
The problem is multifaceted, because we not only aren't told the truth, we are told lies that make things even worse, and people seem to like those.
For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected. Either democracy has broken beyond repair, or humanity averages to dumb. I'm inclined to the latter, because I believe that every individual, even if they can do smart things, is very dumb in other things.
>For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected.
Are you from the 1800s? Malthusianism has been discredited for decades, thanks to the green revolution and falling fertility rates. Not to mention all politicians that tried to do something (ie. didn't "ignore the problem") have a sorry track record - eugenics, one child policy, or forced sterilizations.
I don't believe they are talking about malthusianism. That's a straw man. The arguement is that the sheer number of people is causing damage to the natural environment, not that we can't grow enough food to feed people.
I don't care about doctrines, I'm only in favor that politicians let birth rates naturally decline as people try to give better lives to fewer kids, and themselves. My grandparents had a dozen kids, my parents had three, I had zero. That's good for the planet, and the economy can take it with proper preparation.
Infinite growth, in any form, is a fairy tale for economists.
I don't really follow this logic on two accounts. First is that when you remove yourself from the gene pool what you're effectively doing is simply ensuring that a larger percent of the children of the next generation come from families whose values you'd probably find quite distasteful. And their children will also end up holding those values at a high rate. This means that in the future 'your' values will have less influence and 'their' values will have more. This effect is going to be much greater than any sort of resource consumption reduction on what happens to the planet in the future.
The second is that the status quo on Earth is never sustainable. For but one example among many on this note, Earth has gone through multiple mass extinctions - long before humans arrived on the scene - and it will continue to do so; in fact we're rather overdue for one. So the idea of living in perpetual harmony with the planet sounds like a nice goal, but is itself also a fairy tale. This certainly isn't an argument to just YOLO away the Earth, but rather that doing things that are relatively self destructive for the sake of trying to achieve a perpetual harmony is unwise, because that goal is impossible to achieve.
> overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected
Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
Most developed societies. When you live by subsistence agriculture, having lots of kids is a benefit as they are free labor. When a culture urbanizes and industrializes, they are less of a benefit.
It's most societies, period. Of the 237 nations and territories recognized by UN, only 42% had a sustainable fertility rate. [1]
It seems reasonable to assume kids having more positive economic power in the past played a significant role, but there's counter-examples abounds in modern times. Nigeria is heavily urbanized yet has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Or on the other end of the spectrum, Thailand has a very large chunk of people living off farming, yet has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
Developing countries are no different actually.
It's only really sub Saharan Africa still growing.
This is a dubious use of "society", and it ignores the fact that the world population is growing at an extremely fast rate still.
Populations can grow, even rapidly, in the short run even with collapsed fertility. This is because in part it's a lagging metric, but more importantly (and less intuitively) because fertility also determines the age ratios within a society. Imagine a society has a common fertility rate of 1 then that means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. So if there's 1 new born, then there's 2 20-40 year olds, 4 40-60 year olds, and so on. High fertility rates result in societies with far more younger than elderly populations, and vice versa for low fertility societies.
In the past most societies had high fertility rates, which means there are relatively few elderly, relative to younger people, today. So the global death rate is relatively low as the the number of people annually exiting the stage is relatively low. But when low fertility generations start to die off, this gets turned upside down. You'll have large numbers of elderly dying off, and they'll make up the majority of the population. But this only happens ~80 years after the birth of the low-fertility generation.
This is why Japan looks so catastrophic today even though their fertility rate is much higher than places like South Korea. They've had a mediocre fertility rate since the 60s which then went into collapse in the 70s. By contrast South Korea had a fertility rate of 6 in the 60s, and didn't fall below replacement until the 80s. So Japan has had a solid decade or two head start. The fact we still aren't at the life expectancy of the first below replacement generation in Japan also means today is still going to be seen as 'the good ole days' for them. And this is where most countries are headed.
The world population will peak sometime between 2060 and 2100, and then start declining. 2060 is like… 34 years away.
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
Not close enough to avoid total ecosystem collapse.
> Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
And governments in those countries are importing as many people as they can to paper over their own population decline.
What's the international market price of a person?
> And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
It is part of the politician's job to educate and form the opinions of the populace. Lately politicians have just figured out that instead of nurturing opinions that are good for society as a whole it is more effective to nurture opinions that increase their chances of reelection.
> It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
One of the major roles of elected officials is to take responsibility for what's happening, that's the major point of representative democracy. People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older than 7.
Not to mention that in the real world, all candidates are equally disinterested in the lives of people or fish. It doesn't matter who people vote for.
> If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job, they all promise good things but never deliver and keep blaming the guy before them instead.
> People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older that 7.
Authority and responsibility inherently and unalterably lie with the people; that they either by explicit delegation or tacit toleration allow others to exercise power on their behalf does not relieve them of either. This is the basic thing that everyone ought to understand.
> People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job...
You don't have long term version?
There's never been a government in the world whose majority wasn't influenced by taking bribes.
Darn, originally from northern Europe, I have always enjoyed sardines. I was wondering why they are suddenly harder to get.
I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.
Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
Sadly Agent Smith was not wrong there.
He was wrong. Animals don't "instinctively" reach a natural equilibrium when they're introduced to a new environment. They eat all the available food, die off en masse, and repeat, until the food sources which were vulnerable have all gone extinct and the only things left are able to survive.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
Sometimes yes, sometimes an equilibrium is finally reached. The fact that we see more equilibrium than extinction is purely "survivor's bias".
Canned sardines have been a staple of my diet since I was in the womb. I can’t wait for this trend to die off, it has been so difficult to find them lately. I mean I understand all of the reasons for it, and I can at least appreciate that sardines are the most sustainable form of fishery we have, but goddamn it is super frustrating.
I haven’t noticed this at my local Costco in Northern California (plenty in stock this week) but maybe I will next week with this making the news. I usually wait to stock up when it goes on sale but I only eat two cans a week.
Which type do you buy? In olive oil? Any specific brand?
We have apparently reached the stage of the attention economy where even sardines can experience a demand shock because someone branded eating only one food for three days as a "diet"
>We have apparently reached the stage
There used to be only 3 TV channels or so. You had things like Johnny Carson jokes causing a toilet paper shortage.
In Britain, Delia Smith's How to Cook caused 10% swings in egg sales, far more abundant and harder to affect than something like inventories of sardines. https://www.bbcamerica.com/blogs/british-icon-of-the-week-de...
I know this is about sardines, I like canned tuna, oysters and other things. Curious where social media is on the other canned items.
Social media can f#%@ right off if it causes my tuna prices to go up!
I got two dozen of canned sardines at home, selling for 100$ each.
This is only going to get worse with AI and not just for food recommendations. Think "where do I go for a vacation" and then the recommendation is pretty much the same for everyone, and you end up in overcrowded places because everyone else got the same advice.
I can find them just fine in Greece. Imported from Portugal or Morocco, plus some local brands.
Just came from a 2 week vacation in Portugal, they even had their own fancy (and very colorful) shops where they only sold canned sardines. Never seen such a range of products.
If we're going to continue to eat sea food, isn't plankton some of the best to eat? It's basically as low on the trophic chain as you can go, unless people start developing a taste for krill I guess.
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting went from viable to being outlawed --- I was worried that my children might live in a time when commercial fishing ceases to be tenable, but now that seems a near certainty.
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
Now I drive my downeaster "Alexa"
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they told me I can't sell no stripers
And there's no luck in swordfishing here
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me.
What will tinned fish review guy do now?
https://youtube.com/@tinnedfishreviews
So I've been thinking about this. It's more general than social media and sardines.
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-c...
99% percent of times „I‘m trying the vital X“ is said it‘s an influencer getting paid to advertise X. Most of the times without saying it’s an ad. And this language accesses the most important good in today’s world: people’s attention.
That's why any attempt to ban advertising would only make it go more underground and harder to detect. No matter how strict the rules, people will find a way. Advertising is vital to competing businesses.
> As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds.
Highly relevant: <https://www.thecut.com/article/nyc-west-village-neighborhood...>
Millions of people are doing 3 day sardine and coffee diets for weight loss?
People will believe anything.
Another version of keto. Protein and fat are pretty satiating.
I will say any 3 day diet weight loss is going to be water weight, though
Eggs are cheaper than fish, even with recent volatility.
Is it feasible to farm sardines?
I got curious about this and found a lot of people in older threads saying that farming sardines can't be done. Apparently small schooling fish are typically very difficult to farm because they're pretty fragile and easily stressed.
Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.
People repeat this thing about satiation but it's not really true. In fact, the most highly satiating food is potatoes. Fish is quite high up there, but other "protein" foods like meat, eggs and cheese are nowhere near the top. Oats and many fruits like apples are higher.
The really stupid thing about fad diets like keto is you either just start craving carbs because food is miserable without them, or you develop an eating disorder. The only thing anyone should do is eat normal, delicious, home-cooked food made from mostly plants.
Locally in Silicon Valley, Costco and Safeway are both out of stock on sardines.
Kippered herring is in stock, though.