184 - Joseph Ogilvy, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with writer and chef Joseph Ogilvy to discuss his first book, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State. Trained at Oxford and seasoned in restaurant kitchens in London and Austin, Ogilvy came to this history the hard way — gutting sardines, mackerel, and John Dory by the half-ton until a visceral question took hold: if that's what half a ton of fish feels like, what does eight hundred thousand tons look like?

The conversation ranges from the state of fine dining to the craft of nature writing, with Ogilvy explaining how Robert Caro's stage-setting in The Years of Lyndon Johnson became his model for holding many interconnecting threads without losing the reader. He walks Jordan through his research — seven notebooks, each labeled with an animal, and a method that refused to separate archival work from interviews with sardine scientists, chefs, and tuna-boat captains. From there the two dig into the book itself: the California Current as a tendency rather than a place; shifting baseline syndrome and why ecosystems resist being frozen in a single "natural" state; greed as a structural force rather than an individual vice; the otter hunt that first drew Europeans to California and the kelp-forest collapse it set in motion; conservation laws that functioned as anti-Chinese exclusion; the salesmanship of Pop Dolter and Albert Halfhill, who conjured markets for abalone and "chicken of the sea" tuna; and Monterey's Cannery Row, Steinbeck, and the long fight over whether the coast is a place of extraction or leisure. They close on Elinor Ostrom and the commons, the Chumash as a rare success story, extraction as the through-line of California's self-image, and Ogilvy's recommendation of Max Miller's I Cover the Waterfront.