How the incredible success of fish fingers – Ute Eberle was born

There are many anecdotes about fish sticks: the invention of this frozen food got a US patent number: US2724651A; you can build a tower up to 74 layers high; a factory in Germany is said to produce enough of them every year to circle the Earth four times.

However, the most distinctive element of fish fingers may be their simple existence. They appeared on October 2, 1953, when General foods launched them under the Birds eye label. This curious breaded food was part of a series of other rectangular foods recently introduced to the market: chicken, ham, veal, eggplant sticks and dried lima bean sticks. Only those of fish survived. Indeed, they have thrived. In a world where many people are wary of fish, fish fingers spread beyond even the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Loved by some, simply tolerated by others, fish fingers have become ubiquitous, both as an inevitable food rite of passage for children and as cultural icons. There is a whole episode of South Park playing with the term fish sticks, and artist Banksy included them in a 2008 exhibit. When Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 90th birthday in 2016, Birds eye gave her a $ 257 sandwich filled with boiled asparagus. , saffron mayonnaise, edible flowers, caviar and, on display, gold leaf fish sticks.

The world hadn’t asked for them
There is perhaps no better guide to explain this success than Paul Josephson, who calls himself “Mr. Fish Stick”. Josephson teaches Russian and Soviet history at Colby college, Maine, but in his research ranges from sports bras to aluminum cans to speed bumps. In 2008 he wrote what is still considered the most important academic essay on this product today. For that research, he had to source information from fish companies, which proved to be particularly difficult. “In some ways it was easier to get into Soviet archives that had to do with nuclear bombs,” he recalls.

Josephson doesn’t like sticks. Even as a child he did not understand why they were so appreciated. “I used to find them dry,” he says. Aside from personal tastes, Josephson notes that the world hadn’t asked for fish sticks. “Nobody asked for them.”

But instead they solved a problem created by technology: the excess of fish. More powerful diesel engines, larger ships and new materials had led to an increase in the catch after World War II. Fishermen had begun to catch never-before-seen quantities of fish. To prevent rotting, the fish was cleaned, gutted, boned and frozen on board.

Frozen food, however, had a bad reputation. The first freezers cooled meat and vegetables slowly and this caused the formation of large ice crystals that made food soggy when thawed. And the freezing technique developed in the 1920s by the entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye had not solved the problem: even if the -30 degree plates used to freeze the food had eliminated the problem of icicles, the fish came out reduced to large blocks of mixed fillets that, when separated, disintegrated into “mangled and unappetizing pieces,” wrote Josephson. There have been attempts to sell these blocks in the form of bricks packaged as ice cream with the idea that a housewife could cut the desired amount of fish from time to time. The bulky bricks didn’t have any luck in supermarkets and many stores didn’t even have enough refrigerated space to display them.

Success came when the bricks were cut into identical sticks. In a process that has remained largely unchanged, in factories the fish blocks are passed through an X-ray machine to make sure they are boneless, then they are cut into slices with band saws. These “fingers” are dipped in a batter of eggs, flour, salt and spices, and then breaded and fried quickly in hot oil to fix the breading. The whole process takes about twenty minutes, during which time the fish remains frozen, even when immersed in the deep fryer.

Paradoxical charm
In 1953, thirteen companies were producing 3.4 million pounds of fish fingers. A year later another 55 companies were producing an additional four million kilos. This popularity was partly due to an advertising boost that emphasized the convenience of this new food: “No bones, no waste, no bad smell, no strain,” declared a Bird eye ad.

The charm of fish fingers is somewhat paradoxical. They contain fish, but the one with a less strong flavor, which moreover has been disguised to make it look like chicken nuggets.

The breading disguise may be necessary because, at least in North America, fish is often second-rate. “We have often viewed fish consumption as something below our aspirations,” writes chef and writer Barton Seaver for American Seafood. Traditionally, fish has been associated with sacrifice and penance, food to eat when meat could not be afforded or, in the case of Catholics, to eat on the many days when meat is forbidden. The fish also spoils very quickly, smells bad and contains sharp bones with which you risk suffocating.

The arrival of fish sticks has favored the consumption of fish among those who distrusted this food. “You can almost pretend it’s not fish,” says Ingo Heidbrink, a marine historian at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Heidbrink was born in Germany, where seven million people eat fish fingers at least once a week. Companies have changed the type of fish used at least three times since the introduction of the sticks, ranging from cod to black cod to Alaskan cod, all of which are different species. “Consumers don’t seem to have noticed,” Heidbrink says.

Josephson calls fish fingers “the hot dogs of the ocean”. Served in the oven or accompanied by mashed potatoes, they have quickly become the favorite food for school canteens or family dinners. With the pandemic, demand has increased, in some countries it even seems 50 per cent, because during the lockdown families stocked up on precooked foods.

It may come as a surprise to know that fish fingers are quite sustainable. In most cases they contain Alaskan cod, supplied in large measure by well-managed fishing grounds, says Jack Clarke, advocate for sustainable fishing for the UK-based Marine Conservation Society. The impact of fish fingers on climate change is also limited. “I was surprised to find out,” says Brandi McKuin, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently studied Alaskan cod products. Each pound of fish fingers produces about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide, “comparable to the climate impact of tofu,” he says. By comparison, a kilo of beef produces about a hundred times more carbon dioxide.

However, not everyone seems to know exactly what they eat when they consume breaded fish. In the UK, where they call them fish finger (fish fingers), a survey found that one in five young people believe they are really fish fingers.

But this does not stop him from happily continuing to eat them.

(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)