In 1910 few Americans ate tuna; less than a decade later, tuna was America’s most commonly consumed seafood. This shift was largely due to the activities – sport fishing, canning and promotional activities – of Southern Californians. How this was achieved and what happened to tuna during the following century is an action-packed tale filled with sports enthusiasts and creative cooks, fishermen and clipper captains, graduate students and research scientists, hard-working immigrants and hard-hitting advertisers, industrial-strength canners and high-end epicures, Japanese restaurateurs and American novelists, cold war politics and global economics, chemists and nutritionists, fisheries’ experts and worried environmentalists, as well as frugal consumers and high-end aficionados.

About the speaker: Andrew F. Smith teaches culinary history at the New School University in New York. He is the author or editor of 23 books, including his latest, American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food (University of California Press, 2012).