SAMA HOOLE: Bluefin tuna was ground into cat food and given away as a nuisance catch, worthless, until fashion turned the same fish into the most expensive meat in the sea. Lean muscle with the fat all but bred out, so dry the canners have to drown it in soybean oil, or you smother it in mayonnaise, before a grown adult will eat it.

Bluefin tuna was ground into cat food and given away as a nuisance catch, worthless, until fashion turned the same fish into the most expensive meat in the sea.

The fashion was the only thing about it that ever improved.

Look at what tuna is. Lean muscle with the fat all but… pic.twitter.com/oZ3hl1yANE

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) July 21, 2026

Bluefin tuna was ground into cat food and given away as a nuisance catch, worthless, until fashion turned the same fish into the most expensive meat in the sea. The fashion was the only thing about it that ever improved. Look at what tuna is. Lean muscle with the fat all but bred out, so dry the canners have to drown it in soybean oil, or you smother it in mayonnaise, before a grown adult will eat it. The one part anyone truly prizes is the fatty belly the sushi bars charge a fortune for. Prized for one reason. It is the only bit with any fat left on it. Then the mercury. A big tuna spends decades near the top of the food chain, hoarding the methylmercury of every smaller fish it ever ate. Which is why pregnant women are told to ration it and children to keep it to a tin a week. So, the health food. A fish once fit only for fertiliser, stripped of the fat that makes meat worth eating, loaded with a metal you are warned to limit, packed in the seed oil it is too dry to survive without. Rebranded as Chicken of the Sea, then as ocean gold. Nothing about the fish changed, not one cell of it. Only the story did, and the story is where the money always was.

When a food's price swings that hard while the food stays the same, you are not looking at nutrition. You are looking at marketing in a chef's hat. 

SAMA HOOLE on a tin of SARDINES: 375% of your daily B12 (every plant on earth offers none); A third of your vitamin D (more than a British winter gives you) . . .

A tin of sardines costs about a pound. Here is what is inside.

- More omega-3 than a £12 fish oil capsule (still in the fish, not gone rancid on a shelf)
- 375% of your daily B12 (every plant on earth offers none)
- A third of your vitamin D (more than a British winter gives… pic.twitter.com/jYz5kSlqiy

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) July 21, 2026

A tin of sardines costs about a pound. Here is what is inside.

- More omega-3 than a £12 fish oil capsule (still in the fish, not gone rancid on a shelf) - 375% of your daily B12 (every plant on earth offers none) - A third of your vitamin D (more than a British winter gives you) - 74% of your selenium (the mineral half the country is short of) - Calcium off the bones (no dairy, softened until you can't feel them) - 25g of complete protein (every amino acid present) - Mercury at 0.013ppm (swordfish runs seventy times higher)

The supplement aisle sells you that same sardine in pieces. A capsule of the oil, a tablet of the D, a tub of the selenium, forty quid the lot, half of it oxidising before you get home. Or the tin. A pound. The whole animal, everything in its right place.

They keep telling you superfoods are exotic and expensive. This one's been on the bottom shelf the whole time.