Looking west from San Francisco or Monterrey, beyond the surfers and cargo ships, flows the California Current: some 3,000 kilometers of waters that are among the most productive in the world. There, the first settlers encountered abalones the size of a Frisbee, schools of sardines as big as buses, and yellowfin tuna nearly as large as a man. Joseph Ogilvy, a writer and chef trained at Oxford, makes his debut with Tin Can Coast, a history of the California fishing industry that reads like an adventure novel and a warning.
The book begins with the Chumash, a Native American people who learned to let the abalone (a mollusk also known as sea ear) rest when it was scarce and to substitute it with other species, and continues with the arrival of Russian fur trappers, who nearly wiped out the sea otter. For Ogilvy, this was “California’s original sin,” because it disrupted the ecological balance of the coast. Next come the canneries of Cannery Row, the marketing of canned tuna as “chicken of the sea,” the far-fetched anti-odor committees, and the first “conservation” laws—tinged with racism—directed against Chinese and Japanese fishermen. The most harrowing episode takes place on Terminal Island, the Japanese fishing village whose residents were interned after Pearl Harbor and who, upon their return, found everything sold off or demolished.
The chef’s touch is evident in the prose: Ogilvy describes a food chain or an abalone in the pan with the same flair, and he doesn’t skimp on humor or recipes. There are drier sections, such as the chapters on “maximum sustainable yield” and international fisheries negotiations, but these are offset by scenes aboard vessels brimming with vitality. The final assessment is grim: abalone now live in hatcheries, sardines in tanks, and tuna in the holds of recreational boats. The New York Times has called it “eye-opening.”
Where to buy? Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State was published in English on July 21, 2026 (Bloomsbury, 336 pages, hardcover with black-and-white illustrations) and is available in print, as an ebook (click here for the Kindle version), and as an audiobook (click here for the Audible version).
