IT WAS AN ASIDE IN A BOOK ABOUT THE HISTORY OF FERTILIZER, PLUS A MEMORY OF JOHN STEINBECK’S CANNERY ROW, that awoke an intense curiosity in the mind of chef and author Joseph Ogilvy and led him down a five-year journey of discovery. The result is a thoughtful and comprehensive book on the history of California’s fishing industry, its role in thrusting the yet-to-be-created state into world commerce and how it forever changed the once abundant coastline.
Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State, Ogilvy’s first book and certainly not his last, is a fascinating, well-researched and beautifully written tale that starts at nearly the beginning of time stretching forward to the present, including how the first humans found their way to the California Current, which he describes in the prologue as “1,900 miles of the most productive waters on earth, drifting slowly down the West Coast of the United States, slate gray and spumed with surf under the fog, or Prussian blue and dappled with windblown troughs, glinting under the sunlight.”
The Current is a main character of the book, along with its creatures – sea otters, abalone and sardines – as well as the humans that saw those creatures as commodities to be exploited for trade and amassing wealth. Chapter 1 begins with a stark piece of history:
The price of entry for California’s arrival into the modern world was 40,000 otter pelts, 40,000 naked carcasses abandoned on the granite and sand of the California shore.
Otters were hunted into near extinction, their prized fur shipped around the world. Along the way the men who hunted them changed the fabric of the lives of Indigenous people who themselves hunted sea otters for their pelts, but for their own use and within limits. That otters nearly became extinct created a domino effect that impacted the balance of nature.
Monterey and the county’s shoreline also loom large in the book, chronicling the first Chinese fishers, the Japanese, the Sicilians and Portuguese, as well as the emergence of canning technology born in Europe and brought to California, including famously to Monterey. Ogilvy covers the stench of canneries and reduction facilities, pitting tourism interests against the fishing industry, all the way to the present day when what’s left of the once-teeming coast before humans is now more likely experienced behind glass at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Ogilvy grew up in England and the Scottish Highlands. As a kid, he liked to spend hours reading books filled with facts and trivia and was “very happy reading very boring things, which maybe helped with some of the research,” he jokes.
He graduated from Oxford University where he majored in Arabic. Finding his courses interesting but a bit dry and academic – “divorced from people,” as he put it – he turned to cooking as an antidote. By 20 he knew he wanted to be a chef. He finished the degree and began working in kitchens in London and later Austin, Texas. On the days he wasn’t working in a restaurant, he spent his time thinking and writing about how humans interact with food, as well as food’s ecological history.
With Tin Can Coast out officially on July 23, he’s coming to Monterey to talk about his book at the Japanese American Citizens League in Monterey on July 25 and again Aug. 1 at the Monterey Abalone Festival. He spoke to the Weekly via Zoom from the Scottish Highlands about the book.
Weekly: You went from studying Arabic to cooking for restaurants – how did you ultimately get interested in the human and ecological history of food?
Ogilvy: That came about from being in the kitchen – I love being in kitchens, it’s a great feeling. When you’re getting all these ingredients, stuff is coming through and eventually it starts to be a bit automatic, processing it and cleaning the fish. And so you have this little bit of time to think about ingredients. “Where is this coming from? What’s this?” And then, “How does it all fit together?”
The Italian restaurant that I worked in had always been focused very strongly on [explaining] this dish is from Southern Tuscany, from one town in the Pieremonte region, and on the menu it would tell you which town it was from and give a sense of history and a sense of place through the food that it was presenting. It gave you a hint, a sense of where things were coming from and how they fitted together.
At the same time, as the job was getting more automatic, it felt as though there was a bit of my brain that wasn’t getting engaged. So on days off I’d start reading about things. I started reading about the structures and the systems that come and history of food and try to think about it in a more holistic way.
And how does a kid from England and the Scottish Highlands, who moved to Austin, Texas, get inspired to write a book about the California Current and the history of fishing along the coast of California?
There are two strands. The first is a bit of the one I was talking about, which is the backdrop to it, which is all this fish coming through and processing it, cleaning it, thinking: “Where does this come from?” That was the underlying feeling. And then during Covid, I was reading a book on the history of fertilizer, and just like a throwaway line, it mentioned that before they invented artificial fertilizer they used to ground up sardines and spread that on fields – that was something they did in California, specifically.
The first thing I thought was that it was such a weird, strange thing and then I suddenly thought, OK this is what Cannery Row is all about – I read it when I was 14, or however young, and I’ve sort of loved Cannery Row, my mum gave it to me and we talked about it as teenagers. It finally made sense of a place that always seemed kind of like a fantasy fiction place miles away. Then suddenly I came to a completely different context. I’m thinking there’s a whole ecological backdrop to this structural system that’s making this childhood novel something that makes it fit into the place and coalesce with a whole lot of other things.
I also thought, what is it like to see the Pacific for the first time and think, “Let’s scoop all the sardines up.” It’s that feeling of, how has this happened?
From there, it kind of snowballed. I had quite a bit of free time because it was Covid and I kept researching, thinking I’d write an article. The article was far too long and I am enjoying the research, enjoying the writing. I’ll do it on my days off and see what happens.
California is so well known as an agricultural powerhouse, it gets lost that fishing was actually what launched the state, as you well explain, from the time the first people came here from across the Pacific.
It’s one of the things that’s particularly strange. Often because a lot of the way American history is thought of, it’s a kind of westward movement across the land. It’s very tempting to look at California looking from the East. So then the agriculture and terrain of that becomes much more central to the picture, whereas one of the things I didn’t know and I found interesting was looking at California as the frontier of the Pacific world, almost a border of China or the extension of Russia coming down, looking at it from another angle, from a different perspective.
The opening to Chapter 1 on otters – the first commodity that, as you explain, launched California into world trade – is quite bold and haunting. Why did you want the reader to understand from the beginning how they were nearly hunted to extinction?
Giving you a sense of the violence behind the early settling in California and moving into how European nations moved into the territory I felt was very important, and twinning the ecological violence and then the human violence. It felt quite important to me to bring that up to the front.
You also write that the otter massacre and the European invasion it engendered would become California’s original sin, with the aftereffects still rippling though to this day. What are the ripples we’re seeing?
There’s this strange self-interlocking thing where sea otters are now trapped in the Central California coast, then they can’t go north and they can’t go south because of the sharks. What I was coming across in research was scientists saying this is because kelp forests have died off and so sea otters are too exposed and young sharks will take a bite out of them, trying to work out what they are.
The reason the kelp forests are all gone is – not exclusively, but in large part – because the otter population was wiped out and they play this very specific role of keeping sea urchin numbers down. When sea urchins get out of control, they graze off all the kelp and then there’s no kelp forests, and so you get these kinds of hard switches.
It was interesting how in the book, you categorize the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and racism becoming ecological factors.
One of the things that I was very interested in was this idea that the coast became a kind of haven or safe place for communities, particularly in Monterey, particularly for Chinese. It was a place where there was less competition. So for quite a long time, it was a place of safety and freedom and liberal prosperity and liberation. Then it was a sort of twin thing, as anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast got stronger and stronger in the years after the Gold Rush, and at the same time there was a development of tourist interest in abalone; previously European Americans weren’t interested in that sort of thing.
As it became a tourist attraction and became something that was valued, they started looking for ways to crack down on and basically to exclude Chinese fishermen from what had been a refuge. They were using the weapons they had, which at that time was conservation, which was coming into fashion at that time.
It was interesting to rethink conservation as a use of power – and that’s not to disparage it or knock it – but the decision to conserve something or to regulate it, is a display of power, and power can get used for all kinds of things.
You spend some time explaining how the future of abalone was endangered by Carmel’s so-called “King of the Bohemians,” George Sterling, with the “Abalone Song,” and Ernest “Pop” Doelter in Monterey, who popularized abalone as a dish.
They’re easy to write about. They’re fun characters. But one of the things I was trying to get a sense of was giving a bit more of a holistic picture of how the coast was being used and exploited. In a lot of ways I was thinking of a picture of how power was used in the California ocean and how different forms of power – the kind of cultural power of Sterling and Doelter – was actually a very important one.
Sometimes it can be overlooked [and] it’s often industry versus nature. Bringing in the idea that there was a cultural aspect – a lot of the industry was downstream of the cultural power, and George Sterling was, in his own strange way, a very sort of culturally powerful person.
The end of the book is quite poignant, illustrating how what was once wild and abundant thanks to the California Current is now behind glass at the Aquarium. Do you see a way in which the humans can restore the previous give and take we had with the current? Or is it too late?
That was the question I was grappling with quite a lot while I was writing it. I don’t think we can sort of rewind and say we’ll be back to where it was, but I think there’s a way of being honest about what it is, what kind of relationship you want to have with the ocean, and nature. I think there is space for maybe even just pockets of that kind of relationship.
JOSEPH OGILVY speaks 1-3pm Saturday, July 25 at Japanese American Citizens League Hall, 424 Adams St., Monterey. Free. (831) 648-8830. He will also appear at the Monterey Abalone Festival on Sunday, Aug. 2.