Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary’s, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn’t permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary’s have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week.

There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove—some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador budgeted $2 million for the job, which was taken up by a local engineering firm and is expected to be completed in October. As workers cut open the vats, viscous brown fish goo shot out onto the factory floor. It will be mixed with peat moss, hauled out in about 200 truckloads, and thrown in a landfill lined with polyethylene, after which it will be sealed up “like a Ziploc,” according to the lead engineer on the project. St. Mary’s Mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up while describing new hope. “To be known as the ‘sauce plant mayor’ … it’s time for that to be over,” he said.