Food & Beverage · August 2026
Ogilvy had been describing how early conservation law on the California coast was aimed at shutting down Chinese-American fisheries — sustainable harvests closed on ostensibly ecological grounds. Asked to generalise from that case, he declines to exempt conservation itself. In his telling the bigoted version and the benign version share a structure: someone deciding what the relation between people and nature ought to be.
Transcript
Well, exactly. And there's this kind of this kind of potentially sustainable harvest that they had kind of begun there and got closed down because of as widespread racism on the coast, on the West Coast and in California, particularly at the time. But that kind of gets turned into. Targeted conservation laws. So, these conservation laws that were kind of very specifically aimed at, yeah, they're deliberately aimed at closing down the Avalanche fishery as a way of kind of squeezing these communities and making their lives, you know, their lives harder. I find that thing is this idea that kind of it was very interesting to me or useful for me to realize that kind of remembering that conservation in that way is a kind of like it's an exercise in power, if you know what I mean.
You know,
it's it is a you're kind of imposing a vision of what you think the relations between the human and the natural world should be like in that case, it was for very much a sort of bigoted or unpleasant vision of it. But it's you know, you are imposing a vision on the world through conservation.
Yeah, it's a good point. I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about sardines for a minute because they're such sort of such a powerhouse in this whole story. And because they're still fish that people arguably could eat more of, but of course, there are sustainability issues around that, also. Can you just single those out for a second and talk about that?
Yeah. I mean, I think, in a sense, one of the kind of problems for the sardines back in the kind of Steinbeck era, if anything, is that kind of people weren't eating them enough. It began as kind of, you know, the sardine fishery in Monterey began as a way of, you know, they were mostly, they would can them, but the kind of big turning point is actually when they discovered that they could, they could do what they called reduction, which is where they you take whole fish and you grind them up and you press out the oil and then you kind of bake and pulverize what's left over. And then you're at the end, you've got kind of fish meal and fish oil. And those are fish oil for anything. You can use it for making linoleum, you can make it paint, soap, newspaper ink used to be printed with sardine oil. And this fish meal is a great fertilizer and still great fertilizer, but it was also was the kind of it was kind of the main feed for factory farm chickens, which was kind of taking off in California at that time. And so suddenly the market for sardines was, and it wasn't how many people wanted, you know, sardines in tomato sauce. It's what's the market for chickens? What's the market for newspaper ink? What's the market for engine grease? There's just this huge, huge, there's just unlimited kind of demand at that point. Like it's, you know, it's in competition with kind of competition with oil rather than, you know, that's the kind of world that it's in. It's a commodity. And that's kind of, I think, what, you know, after about 10 or 15 years of this, there's this natural population shift in the sardines. And they've been fished harder than anyone, you know, they've been fished 700,000 tons a year.
Oh, my God.