Newfoundland Town Finally Rid of 900,000 Liters of 24-Year-Old Fish Sauce

For over two decades, 110 vats of fermenting capelin and salt have been rotting inside an abandoned factory in St. Mary’s, a Newfoundland town of about 300 people. The stench got so bad that residents would board up their homes each summer to keep it out of their belongings. This week, after a failed 2016 attempt, a local engineering firm began the $2-million provincial cleanup: cutting open the tanks, mixing the roughly 900,000 liters of brown fish slurry with peat moss, and hauling it out in an estimated 200 truckloads to a polyethylene-lined landfill. Work is expected to wrap in October.

The sauce is the leftover inventory of the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company, launched in 1990 by Vietnamese immigrant Sahn Ngo to turn a waste stream into product — male capelin discarded by a plant that shipped the females’ roe to Japan for masago. Regulators blocked the venture and it folded in 2001, leaving the half-finished batches behind. Food scientist Bryan Quoc Le explains the chemistry: gut enzymes break fish proteins into amino acids like glutamic acid (the source of umami), while heavy salt suppresses pathogens and rancidity. Normal fish sauce ferments for about a year; nobody has real data on what 24 uncontrolled years produce.

Le’s read is that the extreme timeline pushes the process well past ordinary fermentation. Salt-tolerant bacteria and yeast keep growing, dying, and spilling their own enzymes into the mix, while a slow room-temperature Maillard reaction — the same browning that darkens soy sauce and ages wine — plays out over years. The unheated factory adds a strange seasonal freeze-thaw cycle. The overpowering smell comes mainly from amines, breakdown products of amino acids that humans are acutely wired to detect because they signal decay and death, which is why even trace airborne amounts read as unbearably rancid to people not raised on the cuisine.