CANNED TUNA IS THE CANNED FISH WITH THE MOST PREJUDICE. IT MUST TARGET DOLPHIN KILLS, HEAVY METALS, OVERFISHING AND ENVIRONMENTALLY HARMFUL PRODUCTION. BUT HAS DÅSETUN DESERVED IT?
The prejudices about canned tuna
Why do I love canned tuna?
There are several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that I have always liked preserves. It may sound a bit absurd, but I had a canning club with my grandfather. We ate preserves together and tried to find things that were special or different. It was about exotic cans with food and stories from the warm countries. It stands as one of the fondest memories from my childhood, and means that I am always on the lookout for new preserves. For me, canning is a way of preserving taste and expression in food products, and it is a preservation method that beats all competitors when it comes to preserving freshness and consistency. That's why I bought a can of the most amazing tuna I had ever tasted. A golden can with rod and line fished skipjack tuna. I had sailed across the Atlantic with a group of friends, and when we landed in the Azores, I went in search of canned goods. there are still manufacturers who focus on quality rather than quantity.
The bad reputation
Recent years' strong growth in sushi, in particular, has contributed to the strain on the tuna population, with the Atlantic tuna particularly hard hit. Tuna has become an endangered species of fish, due to demand alone. In addition, tuna is a predatory fish, which means that it accumulates heavy metals throughout its lifetime. This results in older tuna having a sometimes very high content of heavy metals, which we absorb into the body when we eat them. The heavy metalsHow do you avoid heavy metals in your salad nicoise?
You cannot avoid heavy metals 100% in fish. But you can do many things to make sure that the fish you eat is healthy and harmless. The skipjack tuna I found in the Azores is an excellent example. The species skipjack (katsuwonus pelamis) belongs to the lowest end of the tuna food chain, and it is a fast-breeding tuna, which contributes to the fact that it is caught younger, so that it has a naturally low content of heavy metals. Due to its good reproductive characteristics and rapid growth, the population is stable and the skipjack is therefore not threatened. It's tuna with a good conscience. The fishermen in the Azores also catch it with rod and line, which means that they only catch the tuna they need and that the only thing they catch is tuna. The most important thing you can do as a consumer is to go for quality over quantity. If you look carefully, you can get tuna that is responsible towards both nature and the consumer.