August 3, 2026
Something smells fishy
The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town
Town Finally Escapes the 20-Year Fish Funk as Commenters Fight Over What To Do With It
TLDR: After decades of stink, a small Canadian town is finally cleaning up 900,000 liters of abandoned fish sauce from an old factory. In the comments, people turned it into a chaotic debate over whether the sludge should be buried, dumped, sold, or maybe even eaten.
A tiny town in Newfoundland is finally getting relief from what sounds like the world’s worst forgotten kitchen experiment: 900,000 liters of abandoned fish sauce sitting in giant vats for more than 20 years. St. Mary’s residents have spent summers fleeing their homes, boarding up windows, and living with a smell so bad their mayor became known as the “sauce plant mayor.” Now the province is paying $2 million to haul the brown fish sludge away in roughly 200 truckloads and seal it in a landfill "like a Ziploc." Yes, really.
But the real spectacle is in the comments, where everyone suddenly became an armchair fish-disposal expert. One camp asked the forbidden question: if fish sauce is just salted fermented fish, why bury it in plastic at all? Why not drain it slowly into the sewer? Another suggested the ocean already "knows how to biologically degrade fish," before immediately suspecting this might trigger an ecological disaster. That’s the vibe: half problem-solving, half "this sounds like the start of a horror movie."
Then came the gourmet chaos. One commenter joked about selling it to Swedes who enjoy famously pungent fermented fish, only to discover that loads of cultures actually eat fermented fish. Another swooped in with a tale from a Zurich market about rotten anchovies that smell awful but make sauces taste incredible. So while St. Mary’s is celebrating the end of its fishy curse, the internet is split between burn it, bury it, dump it, or… taste it?
Key Points
- •Cleanup has begun on 900,000 liters of abandoned fish sauce at a defunct factory in St. Mary’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
- •The provincial government budgeted $2 million for the removal project, which is expected to be completed in October.
- •The waste, left in 110 vats for over two decades, will be mixed with peat moss and disposed of in a polyethylene-lined landfill.
- •The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company started in 1990 to use discarded male capelin, but closed in 2001 after being blocked by regulators.
- •Food scientist Bryan Quoc Le explained that fish sauce fermentation relies on enzymes breaking down fish proteins into amino acids, while salt helps suppress pathogens and enhance umami.