Fish Out of Water

This is my canned material.

By Zach Hively

I am a child of the desert. This makes me imminently qualified to ask the big, pressing questions we all have about fish.

Today’s question is:

​Why is fish more expensive the less effort that’s put into it?

Now I am not asking this question about prepared and plated meals of fish. Those cost more because of the care, skill, attention, and expertise required to make the recommended wine pairing look affordable by comparison.

I am asking the question about the fish that you or—at times—I might buy and subsequently overcook.

Let’s imagine, and why not, that we are in a coastal community with ready access to tourists. The costs as I see them for a fresh, whole sockeye salmon are:

• Fishing the fish out of the water.
• Crushing the ice for the fish display.

I grant you that tourists, being tourists, are willing to pay extra for The Experience of preparing fresh fish in their understocked vacation rental kitchens. This enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by the reality that mere minutes away, in any direction, someone will cook the salmon for them and recommend an affordable wine. Also by the reality that fresh fish stare back.

So the tourist factors are a wash. The fresh-caught salmon, as nature intended, costs $20 a pound. Same as the bears pay.

This brings us back to today’s question, which I remind you is Why is this very fish most expensive before any more effort is put into it?

I can—in the middle of the desert!—drive to a store without use of a boat and purchase a nearly one-pound can of salmon for as little as $4.99. It wasn’t even on sale. I checked.

​The costs as I see them for a can of mangled salmon are:

• Fishing the fish out of the water, just the same.
• Crushing even more ice for the fish display because this fish didn’t sell right away.
• Shooing off the alley cats who come around when the market closes.
• Packing up the unsold fish (with even more ice!) and sending it to the leftover salmon factory.
• Cooking and mangling all this fish, with or without eyes that stare back.
• Cans and can lid glue.
• The label design necessary to build consumer trust and confidence on a crowded canned fish shelf. Plus, label printing and label gluing, which you simply don’t incur with fresh fish-type placards that say things like “Big Ass Lobster Tails” handwritten in Sharpie.

• Warehousing, shipping, storing, supply-chain retail-pricing, distribution channel verticals, etc. etc. etc.
• Paying the wages of the grocery store employee who has to manually clear or override the self-checkout machine every time it doesn’t trust me, which it shouldn’t, because I don’t work for the grocery store.

These costs reach, if I had to guess, higher than $4.99 a pound. We could probably salvage the entire economy by paying fish mongers directly to feed the fish straight to the alley cats, which let’s face it is where all that canned salmon is going anyway.

I, the aforementioned child of the desert, do not understand this system. No one to my extensive knowledge is mangling and canning prickly pear cactus pads for the coastal elites at a quarter of the cost we pay for fresh-caught prickly pear pads.

​So if you happen to know why salmon and other fish cost less the more effort that’s put into them, I welcome you to keep that information quiet. My big questions are also worth more, the less effort I put into answering them.