Sardines

Sardine tins used by Germans for propaganda, photographed in 1919, American National Red Cross photograph collection, Library of Congress

My husband thinks his phone recently overheard us talking about sardines, because sardines started to be advertised to him in his Instagram feed. Sardines have been on my mind for a while. They are not unrelated to my Cross Fit journey. In the first few months of that journey, I made great progress in strength but then plateaued, at a very modest level, and it wasn't until year two or three that I realized that Jack London was right about protein, actually, and I needed to eat more of it. If you're bro-ing out, you're supposed to eat 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein a day per pound of your desired body weight. In general, also, you're supposed to eat more protein if you're older, which I am. ("You're 57?" said my new favorite young person at the gym the other day. "You're not giving 57.") For me this math worked out to about three times as much protein as I, a spindly pescatarian, had previously been eating.

I rejiggered my meals. Whey protein in the form of shakes made a contribution, and Bob's Red Mill helped by inventing something called Protein Oats, but these additions were far from enough. It turns out that, child of the 1970s though I am, I don't care for cottage cheese; there is no romance in it for me. Peanut butter, alas, is not the friend that we were all raised to think that it was.

If you eat on autopilot, then on any given day, you are likely to run out of ability to keep eating long before you have eaten enough protein. You are no longer hungry, it is 10:30pm, and you face a bowl of cottage cheese, flavorless and slightly gritty. You can solve the problem by eating a pint of ice cream instead, and I did that for a while, but then your sixpack becomes obscured by what the French call a pneu and what in Edwardian English used to be called a corporation. ("At one window stood a gentleman with a large corporation and an embroidered cap, surrounded by a whole company of political friends who waited respectfully and in silence." —Eça de Queiroz, The Maias.) In an attempt to systematically avoid these fates, I invented a variable I called "protein density," which I defined as calories divided by grams of protein. ("Density" is the wrong word, sorry. It's actually the opposite of density: the lower the "protein density," the denser the food is in protein. Think of the number as the denominator, if that helps. It will make more sense when I give examples a sentence or two further on.) In order for me to get enough protein without overeating, the protein density of everything I eat in a day has to tally up to 16 (or less). That is, I have to eat no more than 16 times as many calories as grams of protein. Food with a protein density below 16 is helping me get there; food with a protein density above 16 is holding me back.

Some examples: tuna (4.7), whey protein (5), nonfat yogurt (5.6), cottage cheese (6.2), sardines (8.5), nonfat milk (10), salmon (10.3), egg (12), feta (14), butter beans (15), 2% milk (15.2), Protein Oats (19), chickpeas (20), light sour cream (20), peanut butter (23.75), farro (26.7), almonds (28.3), almond milk (30), regular oatmeal (36), half and half (43.8), rice (53), Van Leeuwen ice cream (63), pecans (70).

I had no idea about pecans. That was a sad moment.

One of my favorite Frank O'Hara poems is "Why I Am Not a Painter," which is about visiting a friend at work on a painting, in which the label on a tin of sardines is legible in an early stage but the letters have mostly dissolved by the time the painting is complete (and compare the more-representational watercolor/collage by another friend of O'Hara's, Joe Brainard). O'Hara jokes that he writes the same way, starting a poem with the idea of the color orange, but as he works, deciding there should be more in his poem, "not of orange," however, but "of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life." In the end O'Hara never even gets around to mentioning orange in his poem; his painter-friend, meanwhile, titles his canvas after the sardines that are no longer in it. The poem might be an allegory of how to write about homosexuality in the 1950s? And also the general, salutary indirection of art.

Notice that I am leaving the sardines in.

If you look at the list of protein density above, and you are basic like me, you think: just eat lots of tuna. Who doesn't like an apex predator? They have the tastiest flesh. Unfortunately, we live in a fallen world, in which heavy metals such as mercury aggregate in that flesh, because it is the final resting place of all the mercury in all the subsidiary fishes eaten by the fishes that the apex predator has eaten. Also, eating apex predators, even farmed ones, isn't great for the fish populations of the world, as I understand it. In terms of not poisoning yourself, and in terms of harvesting at an ecological stratum that is easier for the natural world to replenish, it's better to eat from near the bottom of the fish food chain.

And so I found myself at the lonely end of the canned goods aisle at the grocery store. Logic had brought me there, not love. The good news is that these days some of the tins have beautiful packaging—colorful, spritely, clever. The bad news is that inside there are glistening fishy-smelling fish that in most cases still have their skins and their spines, though not, thank God, even in the most authentic presentations, their heads or guts. Years ago I read that food aversions can be easily hacked. "Researchers have found that eating moderate amounts of a novel or hated food at moderate intervals is nearly guaranteed to work," Jeffrey Steingarten wrote in Slate in 1996. So I bought an armful. I went easy on myself at first; I let myself start with the skinless, spineless ones, however weak-willed this might have been.

I dressed them up, too. I sliced and pickled onions; I mashed avocado; I spread mustard on crackers. I have a friend who swears by horseradish. I was fooled by none of these disguises. I found it easier just to eat the little fishes plain.

I have been eating them for almost a year now. I open a tin as a side, at lunch, if the leftovers in my lunchbox don't contain enough protein. Do I like them yet? Well, I don't mind them any more, and I like it that I'm getting enough protein to be able to improve on a PR every few months by a modest increment. For a while, the Fishwife company was selling a special pair of tongs to eat sardines with. This seemed like a good idea, since I have a tremor, and a trembling sardine on the prongs of a fork is hazardous to the well-being of the book you're trying to read at lunchtime, so I bought a pair. Or rather, I bought a smaller version of the pair, made by a company named Gestura, which manufactured the tongs for Fishwife, currently out of stock but if they come back in, I recommend. Very neatly now I am able to splay open the two halves of a sardine and pry out its spine, which I deposit on a plate beside the tin, where it reminds me of one of the little skeletons that a cartoon cat draws out from its mouth after it has slurped the meat off a cartoon fish. (Some people maybe just crunch the spines up and eat them? Shudder.) Sardines with skin and spine turn out to be more tender and subtle than sardines without, of course, and sardines that cost $9 a tin are usually more tender and subtle than those that cost $2. For the record, in a year of washing out the empty tins for recycling, I have not yet cut myself.

Juliette Alberti and Alfred Annedouche, The Sardine (Alausa pilchardus), early 19th century, Muséum National d'histoire naturelle

Editor’s note, Dec. 23: We are hearing from informed sources that in fact many people chomp down their sardines spines and all.