Fish is Also a Protein
July 20/26
Fish twice a week. That's the number that keeps showing up in the Mediterranean reading I've been doing — not a rule exactly, more like a habit that surfaces again and again when people describe how they actually eat over there. I've been trying it for a few weeks now, and the thing that surprised me wasn't the fish. It was the sardines.
I grew up thinking of sardines as something you fed a cat, or a joke on a saltine cracker at a fishing camp. Turns out a tin of them costs less than a candy bar and takes about ninety seconds to become lunch — olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, some bread if you've got it. I didn't expect to like them. I do.
Twenty-seven years of farming taught me something that applies here even though I never grew a fish in my life: you eat what the land in front of you makes easy. Rice country runs on water — flooded checks, levees, a whole rhythm built around moving water where it needs to go. You don't fight that. You work with it. Apricots came in fast and heavy for about three weeks and then they were gone, and you ate apricots, and you preserved apricots, and you didn't complain that August wasn't June. The land tells you what's reasonable. You listen or you don't, but either way it keeps telling you.
I don't have a coastline. I've got a kitchen and a grocery store, and what's reasonable here is a can of sardines or anchovies that sits in the pantry for months, or a piece of salmon on sale, or the frozen shrimp that's always in the case. That's my version of working with what's in front of me. It's not the same as a fisherman in a village pulling something out of the water that morning, but the instinct underneath it — eat what's actually accessible instead of what sounds impressive — is the same one I grew up with.
What I've noticed, twice-a-week in, is mostly logistical. Fish is fast. Faster than I expected, faster than most of what I used to cook. A fillet in a hot pan is done in the time it takes rice to finish steaming. And there's a variety I hadn't given it credit for — canned, fresh, frozen, cured — enough options that "twice a week" hasn't felt like a chore to schedule around, more like there's usually something in the house that qualifies.
I'll say the same thing I've said before about this whole Mediterranean experiment: I'm not the guy to tell you it's the answer to anything. I'm the guy who spent most of his life eating what row crops and rice ground and an orchard gave him, and who's now poking around in a different food tradition to see what holds up. So far, the fish part holds up better than I expected, mostly because it's easy, and easy is a real ingredient in whether something lasts.
Two nights this week, try fish. Sardines count. Cost is barely an excuse.
From the Field
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