Women’s work in preserved fish industry
Next Monday, on the 8thMarch is International Women’s Day and Caprice would like to dedicate this blog post to them. This time we want to talk about the women who work in the preserved fish industry, especially in that of the anchovy.
The great majority of the workers belonging to that industry were women who were called masseuses, since their job consisted in cleaning gently the Basque Cantabrian Anchovy, to remove the remains such as the skin or the bones. In other words, they dedicated themselves to give massages to the fish.
This work has always been considered 100% handmade, since these women were the ones who performed it every day to ensure that the product was perfect to be marketed.
However, nowadays, not all preserved fish industry keep on working in the same way. These days, there are a growing number of companies that want to speed up these processes and replace people by machines. But, although this way they save time, the product always comes out somewhat damaged, since the delicacy of the hand of a person cannot be compared with the tools of a machine.
For this reason, when buying a quality product, it is necessary to look carefully at the labels and mentions, as in the case of Basque Cantabrian Anchovy, and consider that higher quality products may have higher prices due to the artisan work involved.
There is a huge difference!