--- title: "Newfoundland Is Hauling Away Two Decades of Abandoned Fish Sauce" description: "Crews in St. Mary's, Newfoundland are removing 900,000 litres of fish sauce abandoned in 2001 — and with it, an accidental chemistry experiment." dek: "A shuttered factory in a town of 300 people has been holding 900,000 litres of half-made fish sauce since 2001. Crews are now cutting the vats open — and destroying the only sample anyone has of what fermentation does over 25 years." published_at: "2026-08-05T05:01:33.755Z" updated_at: "2026-08-05T05:01:33.755Z" tags: - "Science" - "Policy" - "Business" source_url: "https://defector.com/abandoned-fish-sauce-canada-interview" source_domain: "defector.com" canonical: "https://hex37.com/newfoundland-hauling-away-two-decades-abandoned-fish-sauce" --- Inside an abandoned factory in St. Mary's, a fishing town of roughly 300 people on the southern coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, stand 110 vats, each about three metres tall. Together they hold some 900,000 litres of what was, in 2001, an unfinished batch of fish sauce. Some of it is liquid. Some of it still contains fish. This summer, a local engineering firm began cutting the vats open, and when the first blade went through, viscous brown goo shot out across the factory floor. The province has budgeted CA$2 million for the removal, which is expected to finish in October. The contents will be mixed with peat moss, trucked out in roughly 200 loads, and dumped in a landfill lined with polyethylene, then sealed — "like a Ziploc," in the words of the engineer leading the job. St. Mary's mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up talking about it. He has spent years being known as the sauce plant mayor and would like to stop. Read as a municipal story, this is a nuisance finally abated. Read as a chemistry story, it is stranger than that. [Fish sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_sauce) is normally fermented for one to two years. These vats have been fermenting for about twenty-five. Most of us reach instinctively for the wine analogy — aging as a single slow arc, gradually better or gradually worse. Fermentation is not aging. It is a biological process being run by living things, and living things do different work at different timescales. ## The first year is mostly digestion Start with what is supposed to happen. You take small oily fish, pack them in salt, and wait. The enzymes in the fishes' own guts leak out and begin cutting their proteins apart — first into large fragments, then, over months, all the way down to individual amino acids, at which point the solids liquefy. One of those amino acids matters more than the rest. Glutamic acid makes up something like 30 to 40 percent of most proteins, according to food scientist Bryan Quoc Le, who has a background in both chemistry and Vietnamese cuisine, and glutamic acid is what the tongue registers as [umami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami) — savouriness, the fifth basic taste alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter. The salt is doing three jobs at once. It keeps disease-causing microbes from growing. It suppresses the bacteria and yeasts that would turn the fat rancid. And it supplies the sodium ions the tongue needs in order to read glutamic acid as savoury at all. On its own, Le notes, pure glutamic acid tastes like soap. ## How a waste stream became 900,000 litres The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company started in 1990 on a genuinely good premise. A processing plant in St. Mary's was shipping female [capelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capelin) — a small silvery North Atlantic fish in the smelt family — to Japan, where the eggs became masago, a [roe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe) used in sushi. The male capelin were worthless to that trade. Sahn Ngo, a Vietnamese immigrant, looked at the discarded males and saw the raw material for one of his cuisine's foundational condiments. What he also had was an industrial fermentation operation situated among a few hundred neighbours who had not agreed to smell it. Regulators blocked his product, and the company shut down in 2001. Emptying 110 vats costs money; walking away costs nothing. So the vats stayed, the fermentation kept going, and the bill sat unpaid for twenty-four years until residents had pushed hard enough and long enough that a government picked it up. An earlier attempt in 2016 went nowhere. ## Twenty-odd winters in an unheated building The factory has no climate control. For a large part of each year, on that coast, the vats are effectively refrigerated; each summer they warm back up. That seasonal cycling is not how anyone ferments anything on purpose. Fish are not sterile, and some of the bacteria and yeasts living on their skin tolerate very high salt. Those organisms grow slowly — on the timescale of wine or whiskey rather than a batch of sauce — and when they die, they release their own enzymes into the vat. That is the mechanism that keeps the process running long past the point where a normal batch would have been strained and bottled: the breakdown doesn't stop, it just changes hands. Le points to continuously maintained soy-sauce broths in Korean monasteries, kept going for a century, as the nearest thing to a precedent. Meanwhile purely chemical reactions get their turn. Amino acids react with trace amounts of sugar in what is called the Maillard reaction — the browning that gives bread its crust and roasted coffee its colour and depth. Heat accelerates it, which is why we associate it with ovens, but it proceeds at room temperature too, given long enough. Ten or twenty years is long enough. It is part of why soy sauce is black and why a two-decade-old wine tastes nothing like a young one. ## Why the whole town could smell it The odour comes from what happens after the amino acids form. Bacteria strip the acid group off them, releasing carbon dioxide and leaving behind a class of compounds called amines. Humans detect amines at almost absurdly low airborne concentrations, because amines are the smell of a corpse — a signal of death, and often genuinely toxic. Tolerance is largely a matter of exposure; on Phu Quoc, Vietnam's fish sauce island, people live with concentrations that would floor a visitor. Layered on top is rancidity. The fishes' fat has been oxidising in air for a quarter century, breaking down into aldehydes and ketones — small, extremely volatile molecules that humans are also very bad at ignoring. This is what residents have been living with. In 2019 one described her annual routine of boarding up her windows and doors and leaving town for the summer so the smell would not settle into her belongings. Laundry could not be hung outside. ## A landfill answer to a chemistry question Le would taste it. He said so plainly: 100 percent, for science, and he doubts it would kill him, because nothing much survives salt at that concentration — high salt, high sugar or sufficient acidity is one of the oldest principles of food safety. His guesses about the flavour are more interesting than a simple verdict of "spoiled." Rancidity and amines would come forward hard, probably overwhelmingly. But amines and aldehydes readily bond to each other, and a quarter century of that would generate combinations no one has characterised. There could even be an undercurrent of sweetness, he speculates, since some artificial sweeteners share structural features with those products. Acidify it — a squeeze of lemon, the way Vietnamese cooks build a fish sauce dressing — and you might cut the amines enough to find out how much savouriness is actually underneath. He notes that Worcestershire sauce came from something similar: a barrel of fermenting fish, forgotten for a couple of years by chemists, then rescued with vinegar. What is in these vats, he says, is a black box. And that is the awkward shape of this story. The accident produced chemistry that intentional production never creates, because nobody would deliberately run a fermentation for twenty-five years through an unheated Newfoundland winter — an umami depth mixed with decomposition products in a balance that exists nowhere in the literature, because there is no literature. Which is also why nobody could argue effectively for keeping any of it. The odour was a measurable harm with 300 residents and a mayor behind it. The scientific value was hypothetical, unnamed, and had no constituency. Peat moss and a sealed landfill cell are not reversible. The vats will be empty by October. Whether a few litres should have been set aside and studied first is a question that can no longer be answered by looking — and it raises a broader one worth sitting with: how many other abandoned fermentations, in other shuttered buildings, are quietly running experiments nobody has thought to read.