www.montereycountynow.com JULY 23-29, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Monterey and the county’s shoreline also loom large in the book, chronicling the first Chinese fishers, the Japanese, the Sicilians and Portuguese, as well as the emergence of canning technology born in Europe and brought to California, including famously to Monterey. Ogilvy covers the stench of canneries and reduction facilities, pitting tourism interests against the fishing industry, all the way to the present day when what’s left of the once-teeming coast before humans is now more likely experienced behind glass at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Ogilvy grew up in England and the Scottish Highlands. As a kid, he liked to spend hours reading books filled with facts and trivia and was “very happy reading very boring things, which maybe helped with some of the research,” he jokes. He graduated from Oxford University where he majored in Arabic. Finding his courses interesting but a bit dry and academic—“divorced from people,” as he put it—he turned to cooking as an antidote. By 20 he knew he wanted to be a chef. He finished the degree and began working in kitchens in London and later Austin, Texas. On the days he wasn’t working in a restaurant, he spent his time thinking and writing about how humans interact with food, as well as food’s ecological history. With Tin Can Coast out officially on July 23, he’s coming to Monterey to talk about his book at the Japanese American Citizens League in Monterey on July 25 and again Aug. 1 at the Monterey Abalone Festival. He spoke to the Weekly via Zoom from the Scottish Highlands about the book. Weekly: You went from studying Arabic to cooking for restaurants—how did you ultimately get interested in the human and ecological history of food? Ogilvy: That came about from being in the kitchen—I love being in kitchens, it’s a great feeling. When you’re getting all these ingredients, stuff is coming through and eventually it starts to be a bit automatic, processing it and cleaning the fish. And so you have this little bit of time to think about ingredients. “Where is this coming from? What’s this?” And then, “How does it all fit together?” The Italian restaurant that I worked in had always been focused very strongly on [explaining] this dish is from Southern Tuscany, from one town in the Pieremonte region, and on the menu it would tell you which town it was from and give a sense of history and a sense of place through the food that it was presenting. It gave you a hint, a sense of where things were coming from and how they fitted together. At the same time, as the job was getting more automatic, it felt as though there was a bit of my brain that wasn’t getting engaged. So on days off I’d start reading about things. I started reading about the structures and the systems that come and history of food and try to think about it in a more holistic way. And how does a kid from England and the Scottish Highlands, who moved to Austin, Texas, get inspired to write a book about the California Current and the history of fishing along the coast of California? There are two strands. The first is a bit of the one I was talking about, which is the backdrop to it, which is all this fish coming through and processing it, cleaning it, thinking: “Where does this come from?” That was the underlying feeling. And then during Covid, I was reading a book on the history of fertilizer, and just like a throwaway line, it mentioned that before they invented artificial fertilizer they used to ground up sardines and spread that on fields—that was something they did in California, specifically. The first thing I thought was that it was such a weird, strange thing and then I suddenly thought, OK this is what Cannery Row is all about—I read it when I was 14, or however young, and I’ve sort of loved Cannery Row, my mum gave it to me and we talked about it as teenagers. It finally made sense of a place that always seemed kind of like a fantasy fiction place miles away. Then suddenly I came to a completely different context. I’m thinking there’s a whole ecological backdrop to this structural system that’s making this childhood novel something that makes it fit into the place and coalesce with a whole lot of other things. I also thought, what is it like to see the Pacific for the first time and think, “Let’s scoop all the sardines up.” It’s that feeling of, how has this happened? From there, it kind of snowballed. I had quite a bit of free time because it was Covid and I kept researching, thinking I’d write an article. The article was far too long and I am enjoying the research, enjoying the writing. I’ll do it on my days off and see what happens. California is so well known as an agricultural powerhouse, it gets lost that fishing was actually what launched the state, as you well explain, from the time the first people came here from across the Pacific. German-born Chef Ernest “Pop” Doelter, dubbed “The Abalone King,” stands by a pile of abalone shells on Fisherman’s Wharf in this photo, taken circa 1930. Doelter is credited with popularizing abalone through his method of tenderizing the sea snail, then breading and frying it. At the Monterey Bay Abalone Company, workers start with “seed” abalone from hatcheries, only about an inch in shell length. It takes about four years to grow the abalone to the right size for sale, at least 3.5 inches in shell length, translating to about a quarter pound in weight. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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