December 14, 2022 — San Diego, California, was once known as the “Tuna Capital of the World.” Throughout much of the 20th century, thousands of workers caught cheap albacore tuna off the coast and packed it in canneries that lined the city’s waterfront. But by the 1980s, operating costs and foreign competition were too high, ships stopped their journeys out to sea, and the canneries closed down.
Now, some 40 years later, San Diego startup BlueNalu is looking to put the city back on the culinary map — but with a very different approach to producing seafood that doesn’t involve fishing.
Five miles inland, in a sprawling office park, BlueNalu is growing fish cells in large stainless steel tanks, known as bioreactors. Instead of producing the cheap, $5-per-pound albacore tuna San Diego was once known for, BlueNalu is brewing up Pacific bluefin tuna toro — the prized fatty belly portion of the near-threatened fish, which fetches over $100 a pound on the retail market.
The meat is made by taking a small amount of fish cells (sourced from a San Diego fishery), placing them in the bioreactor, and feeding them a mix of nutrients, such as amino acids, salts, and sugars, for several weeks until they can be harvested for consumption. It’s colloquially called “lab-grown meat,” though BlueNalu prefers the term cell-cultured, while most in the nascent industry call it “cultivated” meat. Whatever the name, it does taste good.
I should add that I’ve never eaten the belly fat of a bluefin tuna — the fish is on Seafood Watch’s red list because of its near-threatened status (its population has dwindled to just 3 percent of its historical, pre-fishing levels). But BlueNalu’s version, which was served up as sushi and nigiri, didn’t taste far off from how food critics have described the wild-caught version: a butter-soft flavor bomb. It left a thin lining of oil on my mouth in a way mere plant-based meat never has — something that maybe only real fish could achieve, even when made by replicating cell after cell.