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“Follow the Thing”: Coles Eco Tinned Tuna

In the summer of 2012 I found myself in the tinned food aisle of a Sydney Coles

supermarket. The aisle presented a fascinating insight into our urban material culture. While

the labels on the neatly packed tins of tuna highlighted nutritional information, they obscured

the many stories of the components (fish, salt, oil, tin and steel) and their production and

trade through communities around the world. Each community has a history, political issues,

economic situations, environmental tragedies, inequalities, and a share of blood, sweat and

tears. We could call tinned tuna a quintessential product of commodity fetishism. That is, the

stories of those who have laboured these products have tended to be discursively and

geographically distant from the material tins and fluoro lit supermarkets. Moreover, tinned

tuna is a mundane, functional, ubiquitous and unglamorous food item. It is always around,

with a permanent place in most kitchen cupboards and supermarket shelves, and until

recently the packaging rarely changed. Perhaps because of its mundaneness tinned tuna has

captured little attention in interdisciplinary food studies and other areas of social science and

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humanities research . Because of both this mundaneness and lack of information, the simple

illustration on the side of one tin caught my attention. The main image was a silhouette of a

person holding a pole and line fishing rod, which resembled a lasso (see fig. 1.4). The non-

descript and possibly male figure simultaneously signified nobody in particular and every

fisherman. A similarly simple and docile looking tuna appeared to be jumping out of the sea,

as if on its own accord. Underneath the illustration, the text read ‘responsibly fished’. This

was the first time I had seen an ethical claim on a tin of tuna, other than the familiar dolphin

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friendly logo that began in the 1990s. Indeed the Coles media release dated 30 August 2011
stated: ‘Coles has this week launched Australia’s first responsibly sourced, supermarket

brand tuna, providing its customers with a more responsible choice of Australia’s favourite

canned fish at an affordable price’ (Daly 2011, para. 1). Although the word responsible

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