Ocean Watch

I had the good fortune to visit American Samoa last week. One of the first things I saw in Pago Pago, the capital, was a statue of a jaunty-looking tuna wearing glasses and a red hat. A sign below said, "Home of Charlie the Tuna."

You remember Charlie. He was the striving tuna of the '60s TV ads who desperately wanted to be selected by Starkist. Every time he went for the hook, however, it jerked away and returned with a sign that said, "Sorry Charlie. Starkist takes only the best tuna."

Charlie lives in Pago Pago because that's the home of the Starkist canning factory, a place I desperately wanted to visit. But I got a message similar to Charlie's: "Sorry, Susan. Starkist doesn't give tours."

Ah, but Chicken of the Sea next door does. That cannery, called the Samoan Packing Co., not only welcomed me, but gave me a tour that knocked my socks off.

Actually, it knocked my sandals off. To walk through the factory, I had to don white rubber boots, a white hairnet and a white hard hat.

White is the color theme there because the place is immaculate.

And contrary to what I expected, the place smelled deliciously like cooked tuna.

My patient, knowledgeable guide, Nicky Vaiomanu, walked me through the cannery while explaining the process. It begins when the tuna boats tie up to the dock behind the factory and transfer their cargo of frozen tunas into the plant's walk-in freezers. (The fog of cold air escaping from those big freezers felt wonderful in Samoa's hot, humid air.)

From the freezers, the whole tunas go directly into steam cookers and exit on conveyor belts, where workers dehead, degut, deblood, deskin and debone the fish.

This is hot, tedious labor for the people who work these belts, but the joyful spirit I found everywhere in Samoa prevails here, too. Folks on this line were singing.

By the time the fish reach the end of this belt, all that's left are big tan chunks of mouth-watering meat. A machine measures specific amounts of this meat and packs them into those stubby cans we know so well.

As the little cans ride along, pipes with pukas squirt in a precise amount of water. Further along, they get their lids, nicknamed hubcaps, sealed in place.

These airtight cans drop into cylindrical ovens that look like small oil tankers, and steam-cook at high heat. From there the cans fall into giant metal baskets which strong workers upend into a labeling machine. Finally, out comes the Chicken of the Sea trade name with its familiar mermaid logo.

But the squat tins are still a long way from our pantries. The cans must get boxed, shrink-wrapped, crated, loaded into containers and hauled aboard ships bound for the company's San Diego home base. The product is distributed from there.

The Samoan Packing Co. employs about 2,500 people who work around the clock, shipping about 60 containers of canned tuna a day. Besides an extraordinary number of fish, this requires painstaking coordination and diligent workers, both abundant in this company.

From now on, whenever I open a can of tuna, I will remember the people who worked so hard, while singing, to make it for me. Thank you, Nicky and company managers, for a most memorable tour.