Why Americans Fell Out Of Love With Canned Tuna

I can save everyone 13 minutes of their life: Cost, cost is why we 'fell out of love' with canned tuna.

I stopped buying canned tuna about 15 years ago. I saw the price double and then double again, the can shrunk by about 15% to 20%, and the quality of the tuna fell off the cliff. The tuna went from 'chunk light' that were actual chunks to 'chunk light' that were little more than mushy scraps. As a bad deal all around, I stopped buying. It really is that simple.

Tuna used to come with tuna oil but you can sell tuna oil in capsules so they siphoned the tuna oil from the tuna and replaced it with vegetable oil or water. They also pack the cans with the tiny scraps making the tuna more mush than meat. They've engineered things to extract ever dollar possible and as a consequence they've stripped tuna of much of its goodness.

Around 2000 the cans went from 6 oz. down to 5 oz. Then the tuna went from solid chunks to mush that looks like floor sweepings.

Cost is what drove me away from tuna. I started eating tuna heavily in college because it was good and cheap, that is no longer the case

I mostly stopped eating canned tuna because the quality dropped dramatically about a decade ago. There's weird stuff floating around inside the cans that used to not be there. The flavor profile changed too. And bone fragments started making their way into the product. And the price went up. The product today on store shelves is far worse than it used to be and is more expensive as well.

Pity. This stuff got me through college when I was a starving student. My fav recipe is tuna salad: 1 can of tuna 1 tablespoon of mayo (more if you like it creamier) Half a can of canned corn (water based) 1/6 head of lettuce Pinch of salt and pepper Canned jalapeño slices Tostadas and Cholula hot sauce 🤗

The whole story left out the high concentrations of mercury in tuna.

It's watery and is basically mush in a can. You could barely do anything with it, because even after getting rid of the majority of the oil or liquid it is packed with, the fish content itself is so mushy that it ruins your recipe. Plus, over the years, canned tuna went on to developing a metallic taste to it. Lastly, the quality of canned tuna went down, but the cost of it shot up. The nerve!

The main reason people quit buying canned tuna was because no one wants to open a can of tuna and find a can full of tuna fiber slurry. If i wanted a can of tuna byproduct i would have bought a can of tuna byproduct. Not buying tuna from any brand that advertises "Chunk tuna" but when you open the can you get tuna slurry.

They aren’t talking about mercury in the fish. USDA suggests to eat tuna once a week to avoid too much mercury.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I discovered TONNINO brand of Tunafish in good tasting Olive Oil. We regularly eat this Tuna with chopped Green Onions, a little Horseradish and sometimes Capers. No bread or crackers...just Tuna. Delicious

I stopped eating it because of the mercury and high prices

And since 2000, the size have been shrinking. In 2000, it was 7 ounces a can. Then it was 6 ounces. Then 5 ounces. I've seen some at 3-5 ounces now. The problem is that we are getting less tuna, while the price increases.

I only eat sardines and anchovies, basically small fish when in I read about mercury content in fish in the 90s. Haven’t eaten any tuna since.

As a Bostonian i sometimes forget how good we have it for seafood. You can still get live fish and lobster at the docks in the seaport.

They dropped a can of tuna to about 5oz that's barely a sandwich. Can't make tuna salad for more than one person with that. The light tuna is like scraps in a can. The price is crazy.

Not one mention of heavy metal contamination, even to debunk it. What's up with that?

I was a tuna fisherman before 1980. I still eat canned tuna but buy the most expensive can. The expensive can is near what canned tuna use to be. The 99¢/can tuna you fine in the grocery store, in my day, was sold as cat food. Tuna like almost all other ocean species is overfished. The migration patterns are changing because the Tuna are searching for the small fish they normally eat. But small fish like herring are overfished, too. They're probably less than 5% of their historic numbers. As they become harder to find industrial fishing fleets are catching Krill - small crustaceans eaten by small fish up to some whales. Up to 200,000 tons are caught yearly. So the whole ocean food chain is starving, scrounging for food. The brands you think of as home brands are owned by foreign companies. The have no connection to America, UK, or other countries where they originated. They don't care if local fishermen or cannery workers have a job. Only profits. China alone probably has more fishing boats than the rest of the world combined. And they don't appear to have any standards or limits on the species or numbers of fish that can be caught. Chinese fish the open ocean around the world and off everyone's coast. They fish coastal waters where they can get away with it or their government can browbeat the locals. Most American West Coast salmon are caught in Asia. Salmon cross the North Pacific to Asia as part of their migration. Less than 10% of the salmon return. Many runs have fewer than 1% returning to spawn. It's all fixable, but we need to start with allowing the small species to expand their numbers. We want whales to come back. What will they eat?

30 years ago a can of solid white tuna consisted of one fairly large portion of fish with a few scraps. It was delicious, now they are selling mush, while the sushi market consumes the bulk of the quality cuts. Mayonnaise now has soy oil in it so, you're not missing much to pass on tuna sandwiches.