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Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin’s exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans. – Kings of their Own Ocean, Karen Pinchin, Knopf Canada
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When springtime arrives and bluefin return to their Mediterranean birthplace off the shores of southern Spain, thousands of tourists arrive with them, hungry to consume fresh bluefin and the culture that originated Barbate’s ancient traditions. A short drive from the town’s network of docks and loading facilities, one factory advertises bluefin tours, offering visitors a chance to learn about the fishery’s history and witness a tuna butchering.
Entering the roadside attraction for five euros, I walked under bluefin models and nets hanging from the ceiling in moody ocean lighting. Behind wide glass windows, a roughed-up tuna sat atop a slab, its top skin shredded and torn, its fins brown and broken, nothing like the prime thousand-dollar specimens I saw in Tokyo or Madrid. This was a tourist fish: a fish with purple- black meat that makes it virtually worthless, there only for the spectacle of its dismemberment.
To open the demonstration, a blue- shirted man wearing a headset introduced the fish butchering process, known as the ronqueo, or “the snoring of the tuna.” Pronounced with a heavily rolled first “r”— rrrrrrrrronqueo— the word draws from the zipper- clicking, snoring- like noise the tip of a knife makes as it is pulled across a tuna’s top ribs. Roll your tongue, pause, then roll it again, pause, and again: this is the sound a knife makes when scored cleanly against tuna bone.
The room’s glass partition muffled the machete’s first chop, but the dull, sharp clunks of the butcher’s knife still reverberated off the walls. Blood gushed from the fish’s body as the worker got to the business of systematically taking the tuna apart, hacking along its pectoral fin, then running the knife along its belly. He moved on to a slightly smaller knife, drawing its blade along each quadrant of the tuna’s loins. Within its mottled skin, the tuna’s flesh was dark purple where it had been “burned” with lactic acid and heat produced from a stressful landing.
The worker ran his knife along the fish’s back, its tip conjuring the strange sound of tearing cloth or a slowly pulled zipper, his breathing controlled but still loud through his amplified headset. The crowd watched, brows clenched, lips pursed, children straight- faced and silent in fascination tinged with horror.
To conclude, the butcher methodically laid each piece of the fish out on stainless steel shelves for the gathered crowd to ogle, the fish’s blood splattering the windows. Bits of flesh dropped off the carcass as the man picked the fish up by its eye socket, dragging it around on the floor to pivot it on the wet ground.
Bluefin is a multimillion- dollar industry in Spain, and Barbate’s community has a good sense of what they’re selling and to whom they’re selling it. In the crowd sat a British couple who live in Portugal’s nearby Algarve region. They came to Spain for a few days and were having a tuna feast that week, eating raw and cooked variations of the fish until they weren’t sure they wanted to eat any more. The night before, they had dined at El Campero, a white- tablecloth Michelin- starred restaurant with a 95-euro prix-fixe tuna tasting menu. The restaurant mostly serves tourists and is staffed by waiters who wear white shirts emblazoned with a tiny teal tuna over their hearts.
Excerpted from Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin Copyright ©2023 Karen Pinchin. Published by Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
