In tuna-obsessed Tunisia, a favorite dish is becoming a lot less affordable

You may be one of over 5,000 subscribers to ‘Popping Tins’, an email newsletter dedicated exclusively to canned seafood. Maybe you belong to a canned fish-of-the-month clubor have focused through a canned fish cookbook which tells you how best to prepare an already cooked food.

Perhaps, like some TikTok users, you even hold a weekly “date night with canned fish” with your partner.

But until you’ve been to Tunisia, whose North African coast faces Italy across the Mediterranean, you haven’t realized the full culinary potential of canned fish — in this case, tuna.

The Tunisians put canned tuna on salads. They put it on bowls of stew. They dollop it on top of pasta. They put it in brik, the hot pastries of fragile dough. They toss it on top of the grilled eggplant-and-bell pepper appetizer salata mechouia, and arrange it in a decorative pattern along with a quartered hard-boiled egg and an olive or two.

Pizza arrives with a handful of canned tuna in the center. Deli customers who ask for no tuna often get a blank stare, a frown of confusion, the admonishment, “just a little”—and a sandwich sprinkled with tuna.

“We add tuna, and it’s Tunisian,” says Alaeddine Boumaiza, 29, a chef who pop up diners in Tunis, the capital. “If you want to eat Tunisian food, ask if it has tuna on it or not.”

He exaggerates only minimally.

Tunisia is a country where debates bursts out over the best local brand of canned tuna, be it El Manar, by the lights of Mr. Boumaiza, or Sidi Daoud, in the opinion of many in La Goulette, the main port of Tunis. The owner of a sandwich shop there said he eats nearly nine pounds of tuna every day.

“You don’t add tuna with tagine, though,” says 42-year-old Dhikrayet Mansour, who had just finished shopping in a small shop in La Goulette where stacked cans of tuna from competing brands monopolized several shelves – Sidi Jabeur, with his three diving tuna; El Manar, with its groovy font; Al Fakhama (“His Highness”), with his fork impaling a tuna steak.

Then Mrs. Mansour tapped her head with a finger: Oops. “Oh no, wait. You can also add it to tagine.”

Before the advent of canned convenience, many Tunisians along the coast themselves preserved fresh tuna with salt and olive oil and dried it in the sun. Now at least half a dozen factories in Tunisia produce cans of tuna ranging in size from hockey pucks to 11-pound behemoths.

But even that isn’t enough for Tunisia’s population of 12 million, most of it concentrated along its fish-rich coast, forcing the country to import more cans from abroad.

No one seems to be sure why tuna is so ubiquitous. However, everyone is sure that it has nothing to do with the name of the country, which just seems like a joke-worthy coincidence.

Aziz Ben Ayed, the commercial director of ManarThon, which produces canned tuna from El Manar, attributed it to the Sicilian and Maltese fishermen who emigrated to Tunisia and brought their food with them.

Mr. Boumaiza, the chef, speculated that it started as a way to decorate dishes.

Rafram Chaddad, a Tunisian artist exploring food traditions cited a 19th-century legend about the origins of the classic “Tunisian plate,” which combines preserved tuna with the spicy chili paste known as harissa, preserved lemon, olives, and pickled vegetables: a poor man from a coastal village near Tunis had gone from market stall to market stall asking what everyone could spare for their meal.

The real explanation, according to Mr Chaddad, is probably much simpler: “We have a lot of tuna,” he said.

A true statement, but an incomplete one. The waters off Tunisia are some of the best spawning grounds in the world for bluefin tuna, the highly prized melt-in-your-mouth variety used in high-quality sushi. Every year, during the tuna fishing season, boats from all over the Mediterranean – Tunisians, Egyptians, Greeks – gather for the catch.

But as globalization wants, very little goes to Tunisians. International restrictions on the bluefin tuna fishery and rising global demand are limiting migration. At wholesale prices of about $55 a pound for the sought-after fatty tuna belly and up to about $18 a pound for the rest of the fish, most of the Tunisian tuna available is exported to bring much-needed dollars into its apathetic economy.

Buyers even fly from Japan to Sfax, the country’s largest fishing port, to catch catches of tuna while they are still swimming in the net. Other live tuna are floated to shore where fish farmers fatten them before export. A small portion of Tunisia’s bluefin tuna is canned and exported.

Tunisia exported $58 million worth of live fish in 2021, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, more than two-thirds to Japan. The rest was divided between Spain and Malta.

Before Japanese buyers arrived in the late 1980s, Tunisian tuna was sold to the domestic market and to Europe. Fresh and canned bluefin tuna was available cheaply in local markets.

“When we saw the prices the Japanese would pay…” said Mustapha Garram, a former tuna boat captain and an experienced sport fisherman who weekly fish segment on the most popular radio station in the country.

“Suddenly you couldn’t buy it anymore. And when we found it, it was very expensive,” he said. “And Tunisians eat a lot of tuna.”

Much of what goes into Tunisian cans now is low quality imported tuna. If it’s from local waters, it’s from less desirable types of tuna.

Bureaucracy, entrenched monopolies and money-losing public companies have held back Tunisia’s economy, economists say, and it cannot afford to lose the foreign currency brought in by tuna. But the economic collapse caused by years of mismanagement has now pushed inflation so high that many Tunisians can barely afford their usual dose of canned tuna, let alone afford their luxury bluefin tuna.

Fishermen in Sfax said many families were preserving their own tuna back at home. This was especially common before the holy month of Ramadan, when a family of four can easily eat six pounds of tuna.

At the end of May, Majid Ben Hamed, a tuna captain who has been fishing since 1992, stood among the blue-and-green fishing nets lining the harbor, everyone busy repairing them with long metal needles. Stains from his cigarette ash and bits of fiber from the nets swirled together in the wind.

The season would start the next day and last just over a month – the limit imposed by an international agreement that was intended reverse overfishing, which had pushed bluefin tuna stocks in the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the brink of extinction by the 1990s. The pact saved the tuna, Mr Ben Hamed said, but lamented that staggering foreign demand had necessitated what had been a small, informal, local industry.

“It’s become so commercial,” he said. He had tasted the bluefin tuna he caught, he said, but few other Tunisians would have ever tasted it.

“There is no one who would not want his family and compatriots to eat this tuna,” he added. “But for people here it’s so expensive.”

Massinissa Benlakehal contributed reporting from La Goulette, Tunisia, and Imen Blioua from Sfax.