Why is tinned tuna so cheap compared to tuna steak when they are both from the same fish?
In: Economics
Tuna steak is made from high quality large tuna fish which is handled carefully. Canned tuna can take small lower quality steak, put it into a deboning and cooking machine in order to create a very uniform large scale product which you can then dump in a can, and stack those cans closely together to ship. And the product in that can has experienced massive shrinkage. You can take the tuna straight out of the ocean and debone and skin it and throw all of that skin and bones away and ship only the compact calories of cooked tuna. And, they can be shipped much more leisurely, because they don’t expire quickly. With high quality tuna, you have to pack it in ice, not too tightly so that the meat isn’t ruined, and ship it it to a place where someone can buy it and cook it before it goes bad. The amount of care and limitations of such an operation insures that such meat is much more expensive to handle and transport, and the nature of fishing ensures that such high quality meat is rarer than lower quality fish meat, and thereby harder to catch in the same volume as lower quality meat.
Take even regular beef: With ground beef, you can only ship meat while leaving the bones behind, and packing the amorphous beef into more tightly packed spaces. With whole beef cuts, you have to transport both the bone and meat, and they can’t be tightly packed in the same way that ground beef can. So, you can either get 1 lb. of ground beef for $4, or 1 lb. of sirloin for $8. They are both basically the same material, you can simply transport meat far more efficiently if it is ground and packed tightly than if it is left whole and packed loosely so as not to ruin the structure.
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