Kristin Idaszak

Fantastic World of Sardines 

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

WINNER OF THE 2025 FOLIO NONFICTION PRIZE

When I first ordered sardines, I was unprepared for the ichthyomorphic jenga tower that arrived on my plate. I was at a café in Sintra, a medieval Portuguese city nestled into a hillside. Tuk-tuks sputtered past my table perched precariously at the edge of the town square. The waitress maneuvered her way along the sidewalk to deliver my lunch. The sardines each gaped at me accusingly from their one fathomless eye, shocked they were no longer swimming. And I, equally shocked, had no idea how to eat them.

So I got down to work, spelunking in their corpses, scraping off their silvery scales, and excavating an infinitude of cartilage or bones. Ribs, maybe, if sardines had ribs, but anyway arched like the buttresses of the castle soaring over us. The Palácio Nacional de Sintra is a thousand years old, and the ceilings are painted with swans and magpies and maritime battles all in suspended animation. The town is something out of a fairytale, so it wouldn’t have surprised me if these fish, at least the ones I hadn’t mutilated, had sprung back to life to admonish me or to implore me to return them to the sea. If I had, perhaps they would only be caught again, this time tinned.

*

Preserved fish—conservas—are a living legacy of Portuguese history, dating back to the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Beneath the streets in the seaside resort town of Cascais are remains of seven cetariae, tanks in a Roman processing factory where they produced garum, fish sauce fermented with salt. A delicacy. The ruins were singularly underwhelming to my untrained eye, but I was drawn to them nevertheless, empty tanks that will never be filled again. After Sintra and Cascais, I made my way up the Atlantic coast to Nazaré and then to Porto, where I wanted to tour a sardine canning factory I read about in the New York Times. The article describes travel as the act of observing other people’s labor. I’m haunted by that idea. But the factory, when I arrived, was closed for tours.

While I was in Portugal, there were transit and infrastructure strikes protesting inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. Tourist sites shuttered without warning. Shops were still open, and day-trippers writhed through streets packed like—you get the picture. Instead of touring the palaces in Sintra, I went to a conservas (preserved fish) store called Mundo Fantástico da Sardinha. There was a Ferris wheel of canned sardines in the window. I wandered in because I wanted to learn how to cook with them, to let their briny smell fill my kitchen, but I was overwhelmed by the shop’s carnivalesque atmosphere and the price tags. Conservas are once again a delicacy—a cultural phenomenon—a spectacle!—but in the twentieth century, they were what my Italian grandmother proudly called peasant food. Apocryphally, during World War II, Portuguese soldiers placed sardine tins over their hearts for protection from enemy fire.

A strange coincidence—if you look closely, about two inches below my left clavicle, you’ll notice a rectangle protruding from underneath the skin the exact size and shape of a tin of fish. Ensconced in the walls of my heart are the delicate leads of an intravenous defibrillator, the electrodes attached to a battery pack in my chest. Ensconced in the walls of my heart are the delicate leads of an intravenous defibrillator, the electrodes attached to a battery pack in my chest. Though my body had healed by this trip to Portugal, I’d come to repair my psyche from the heart surgery.

As the Ferris wheel slowly spun, I held the sardine tin in the palm of my hands, one hundred grams, and marveled at how fragile it is, what tethers us to this world.

Its weight made me think about the woman whose steady hands placed the defibrillator inside my body, and then about workers at the canning factory, mostly women, a vestige of a time when their husbands were fishermen. Though I wasn’t able to tour the factory, I visited the Sun-Dried Fish Museum in Nazaré, a living museum where fishwives continue to preserve the local catch in the traditional manner. The beach was lined with paneiros, large wooden frames with mesh stretched across them where hundreds of petinga (baby sardines), sardines, horse mackerel, and octopuses dried in the sun. The fish were tanning like sunbathers, their glinting heads still intact while their bodies were vivisected. It might have been shocking as someone who is divorced from food systems in my daily life—so much more visceral than the farmer’s market or the fishmonger at home in Chicago—but it was so matter-of-fact.

Amidst the paneiros, old women moved quietly, shielded by a series of interpretive signs that read, in part: “The tradition of sun drying the fish in Nazaré is so old that it is lost in the collective memory of a community that has always been connected to the Sea…Here one can observe, in an almost scenic way, the hard work of women who, still nowadays, portray and experience the knowledge of past times, when sun-drying the fish was essential for its conservation and preservation, especially in times of scarcity.” The Sun-Dried Fish Museum is also a way to provide better working conditions for the women using this traditional knowledge to preserve fish. 

Although I was meant to be a spectator, instinctively my eyes veered from the women, not wanting to turn them into curiosities, instead running along the pink hides of the octopuses, suckers flattened, legs splayed. Now I wish I’d been watching the women, could tell you how their hands moved, the deftness or stiffness of their fingers as they performed their tasks. 

*

This labor is what influencers and their ilk hope to invisibilize, or worse, glamorize, when they coronate preserved fish as “hot girl food” and “totally apolitical” (in a Nylon essay that launched a thousand think pieces). To be a hot girl anything is to be flattened into a vibe. 

A recent New Yorker cartoon depicts a sardine at a lectern, eulogizing a tin—a stand-in for a closed casket. An image of the saucer-eyed, cyclopic decedent rests on an easel behind the tin. The caption reads: “Her final wish was to be laid upon a perfectly grilled slice of sourdough bread, drizzled with trendy olive oil and consumed by a hot girl for a viral Instagram reel.” Now enshrined by the literati elite, I was first introduced to the concept by the source: Have you heard of girl dinner? a group of my female students asked me once. What’s that? I replied. Oh, it’s just a bunch of snacks, they said. Aim higher for yourselves, I remonstrated, relegating myself to the cringiest of the cringe. 

It’s not that I’ve never eaten a dinner of snacks. It’s that I can no longer valorize being too tired or busy or cash-strapped to eat pita chips and hummus as a meal.

For years, though, I didn’t eat fish. I was a vegetarian for environmental reasons, but when I got sick, I started eating seafood for the omega 3s, a fatty acid with anti-inflammatory properties. I still feel a pang of remorse each time I eat a once-swimming creature, but I drown the guilt in their oleaginous deliciousness. 

As far as it goes, sardines are considered a sustainable seafood. As forage fish, they’re foundational to their ecosystems and abundant. Maybe you’ve seen a nature documentary dramatizing the sardine run in Southern Africa, percussion-heavy music pulsing as the enormous shoal undulates through the Indian Ocean like an aqueous murmuration. They elude predators when they’re able by dazzling them into bewilderment through sheer numbers. How to pick off one among billions?

But they’re not invulnerable. The sardine run faces a potentially devastating decline, and fishing for Pacific sardines is currently prohibited due to population collapse in a cycle dating back to the mid-twentieth century. Right around the time WWII soldiers were purportedly using them as makeshift breastplates. In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck immortalized the anthropogenic ecosystem that sprung up around fish preservation in Monterey as: 

a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

After a particularly large haul, he noted the way “the fish ran in silvery billions and money ran almost as freely.” When the canneries closed from overfishing, they left behind a labor force ranging from marine biologists to sex workers.

Apolitical? Really?

What concerns me about tinned fish as hot girl food is that if these elderly Portuguese women—their leathered faces etched deep as the Nazarean cliffs with crevices, wrapped in headscarves to protect themselves from the blistering sun and wearing traditional dress—have any place in its ascendancy, it is purely as a prop, or at best, a background character to lend authenticity. Who, I wonder, benefits economically from the boon of its popularity?

Conceptually, hot girl food and its progeny, girl dinner, devalue traditionally feminized labor. It attempts to do so in an ironic, postmodern way, in the name of pop-feminist reclamation, while simultaneously reinforcing the strictures of gender. The ultra-trendy brand Fishwife features on its packaging a vibrant illustration of a woman wearing a kerchief with a basket of grapes and fish on her head. It must be weightless because a smile plays on her unlined face as she smokes a pipe, eyes closed in bliss. I’ve succumbed to that packaging, I must confess, shelling out nine dollars for sardines with preserved lemon, more than twice the price of the one next to it on the shelf.

*

If conservas are going to liberate us from our own labor, it must happen within the clear-eyed context of someone else’s. And yet, in the moment of truth, it was easier for me to admire the salted fish than the hands holding the salt.

When I try to picture those hands now, I see instead my doctor’s hovering over me on the operating table moments before she implanted my defibrillator. I forced myself to stay awake for almost the entire procedure. I remember thinking, If I lose consciousness, I’ll never come back. That she was giving me a life-saving device hadn’t registered. I thought, This is the end.

At one point in the haze of twilight sedation, I offered to help. Not because I didn’t think my doctor was competent. She’s a brilliant electrophysiologist; her mind is galvanic. Rather, I felt so vulnerable, so frightened, I stopped thinking at all. I was all animal instinct. My offer was a net cast into the inky sea of despair, the weave too wide to catch anything.

The substitution of those hands, my doctor’s for the fishwives’, of operating table for tin, binds my fate up with the sardines. I feel an inexplicable sense of kinship with them, of interconnectedness, a sense which strengthens when I see them lined up in a row. Tail to mouth, mouth to tail.

This makes it all the more awkward when I eat them.

*

Once, at a dinner party, I mentioned being pescatarian. “Is that a religious thing?” a man across the table asked. “No, that’s Presbyterian,” his wife said. But there’s something para-religious about the zeal around tinned sardines, their iconography transmuted into novelty candles with scents like “ocean breeze” (it smells like chemicals and microplastics), screenprinted onto tea towels, embroidered on samplers. The miracle of the sardines is twofold: the fish are multiplied to ubiquity while the women are evanesced.

*

My grandmother worked in a beer bottling factory in the 1950s while my grandfather served in Korea, though she was a secretary. When he came home from the war, she cooked them—I imagine—peasant food. She never had a daughter, and I was her only granddaughter. She encouraged me to be soft and feminine, but I refused to wear dresses, hacked off my hair, and hated the color pink. Even the word girl scraped across my ears, nails over a chalkboard. Ultimately, I wonder if this, too, can be historicized and connected in a complicated way to work. She came of age in a time when it was aspirational to live in a single-income home. I never truly valued her domestic labor, which I deeply regret. I thought the real status symbol was moving through masculine spaces of power and gaining acceptance in them.

Yet this isn’t quite right either, when I trawl my memories to stories of my mother, who achieved that benchmark of success early in a career she later divested from. At 23, she worked as a chemical engineer in an oil refinery that blew up one night an hour after she left. The explosion, which killed 17 people, occurred right around the time she would’ve been arriving home to the first apartment she shared with my father, still newlyweds. I can’t be sure, but I assume she would have just started making dinner.

When I pop open the tab on the sardines now, I’m standing over the kitchen sink. I’ve been writing and forgotten to cook. Inflation has found its way to my pantry. This tin is an indulgence, a guilty pleasure, the last one carried back in my suitcase from Portugal to the United States. It’s whatever is the opposite of hot girl dinner, these few harried bites before I return to my laptop. The sardines are unctuous and umami, slithering greedily down my esophagus. They are fortifying. There’s a story I remember from my Catholic upbringing about a saint who saved a young boy from choking on a fishbone. The saint is commemorated by a blessing of the throats. I invoke him as the fish writhes toward my belly, caught for a moment at my larynx. Panicky, I offer a wordless, mute prayer, and they continue their descent. 

My voice returns.

The labor of other women allows me a few more precious moments typing away, arranging one word after another. I’m a writer and a professor, and I try to use my work to honor the women who came before me. I returned to teaching four days after a battery was packed inside my chest—you get the picture. A premature return precipitated by contingency and precarity threaded fine as a fishing line through my blood vessels and my employment status.

I teach my students how to conjure humble sardines out of ink. How to cast their nets and bring them to life, still squirming on the page, gills spasming for salt water and tails beating ventricularly against the air. Then I gently remind them that the ocean is warming, acidifying, that industrial fisheries kill off fish by the school. We must do what we know how to preserve what’s left. After all, precarity entangles us all: the men catching the fish, the women canning them, students eating girl dinners, my heart with its defibrillator. 

You, too, are bound up in the shoals of glittering sardines who instinctively know how to travel synchronously, palpitating in unison through the sea for survival.

To see how vulnerable we are alone: our only chance for salvation.

Kristin Idaszak is a writer, multidisciplinary theatre artist, and professor. She is a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and received the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Multiplicity Magazine, HowlRound, and elsewhere. She has taught at DePaul University and Northwestern University and was recently a visiting scholar at FLAME University in Pune, India. She is at work on her debut novel and an essay collection about chronic illness, ecology, and myth that braids memoir and cultural criticism. 

Works referenced:

“Cetárias romanas,” Cascais. https://cultura.cascais.pt/list/patrimonio-arqueologico/cetarias-romanas-cascais

Greenaway, Twilight. “We catch too many sardines—but should we stop eating them?” Grist. May 1, 2012. https://grist.org/sustainable-food/we-catch-too-many-sardines-but-should-we-stop-eating-them/

June, Sophia. “How Tinned Fish Became the Internet’s Newest Obsession,” Nylon. June 23, 2021. https://www.nylon.com/life/tinned-fish-snack-internet-obsession

Latham, Katherine. “How South Africa’s Sardine Run is Changing,” BBC. June 8, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240520-how-south-africas-sardine-run-is-changing

Makalintal, Bettina. “Why is Tinned Fish ‘Hot Girl Food’ Now?” Vice. July 7, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4avqpj/why-is-tinned-fish-hot-girl-food-now

Puckett, Lily. “In Portugal, Taking a Dive Into Sardines,” New York Times. July 13, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/travel/portugal-sardine-factory-tour.html

Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. Penguin: 1945.