"You're trying to tell me that tuna would sell in Japan? Who'd eat such fish?"
A fisherman's reply to two Japanese businessmen on Canada's eastern province in October 1971.
Bluefin, it turned out, were a long-standing nuisance to the cod fishermen, who oten found their nets ruined by the tuna enmeshed in them.
From the sea to your plate, the first international tour of sushi's journey in the global marketplace.
One generation ago, sushi's narrow reach ensured that sports fishermen who caught tuna in most of the world sold the meat for pennies as cat food. Today, the fatty cuts of tuna known as toro are among the planet's most coveted luxury foods, worth hundreds of dollars a pound and capable of losing value more quickly than any other product on earth. So how has one of the world's most popular foods gone from being practically unknown in the U.S. to being served in towns all across America, and in such a short span of time? Sushi aficionados and newcomers alike will be surprised to learn the true history, intricate business, and international allure behind this fascinating food.
A riveting combination of culinary biography, behind-the-scenes restaurant detail, and a unique exploration of globalization's dynamics, journalist Sasha Issenberg traces sushi's journey from Japanese street snack to global delicacy. THE SUSHI ECONOMY takes you through the stalls of Tokyo's massive Tsukiji market, where the auctioneers sell millions of dollars of fish each day, and to the birthplace of modern sushi—in Canada. He then follows sushi's evolution in America, exploring how it became LA's favorite food. You're taken behind the sushi bar with the chef Nobu Matsuhisa, whose distinctive travels helped to define the flavors of global sushi cuisine, and with a unique sushi chef blazing a path in Texas. Issenberg also delves into the complex economics of the fish trade, following the ups and downs of the hunt for bluefin off New England, the tuna cowboys on thesouthern coast of Australia who invented the art of tuna ranching, and uncovering the mysterious underworld of pirates, smugglers, and the tuna black market.
Few businesses reveal the complex dynamics of globalization as acutely as the tuna's journey from the sea to the sushi bar. After traversing the pages of THE SUSHI ECONOMY, you'll never see the food on your plate — or the world around you — quite the same way again.
In this intriguing first book, Philadelphia-based journalist Issenberg roams the globe in search of sushi and takes the reader on a cultural, historical and economic journey through the raw-fish trade that reads less like economics and more like an entertaining culinary travelogue. In the years since the end of WWII, the practical protein-and-rice delicacy once unknown outside Japan has become so commonplace that the elements of its trade affect a far-flung global network of fanatics, chefs, tuna ranchers and pirates. While the West reached out for things Japanese, from management techniques to Walkmans, the growth of the market for quality fish, especially maguro, the bluefin tuna beloved by sushi eaters everywhere, paralleled Japan's rise from postwar ruin to 1980s economic powerhouse and into its burst-bubble present. Issenberg follows every possible strand in this worldwide web of history, economics and cuisine-an approach that keeps the book lively with colorful places and characters, from the Tokyo fish market to the boats of North Atlantic fishermen, from tuna ranches off the coast of Australia to the sushi bars in Austin, Tex. He weaves the history of the art and cuisine of sushi throughout, and his smart, lively voice makes the most arcane information fascinating. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Introduction: World Gone Raw ix
The Freight Economy
Prince Edward Island, Canada The Day of the Flying Fish: The birth of modern sushi 1
Tokyo, Japan Tsukiji: Shopping at a global market 15
Narita, Japan The Hub: How Narita Airport became Japan's top fishing harbor 31
Tokyo, Japan Fast-Food Metropolis: Feeding sushi's hometown 47
The Food Economy
Los Angeles, California Are You Ready for Rice Sandwiches?: How sushi became the favorite food of the capital of the twentieth century 79
Paradise Island, Bahamas New Style: How a Japanese-Peruvian Angeleno created a global sushi vernacular 107
Austin, Texas Lone Star: The education of a sushi shokunin in cowboy country 131
The Fish Economy
Gloucester, Massachusetts Imperfect Storms: Weathering boom and bust in the hunt for Boston bluefin 165
Port Lincoln, Australia Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: How the tuna cowboys became tuna barons 195
Madrid, Spain The Raw and the Crooked: On the trail of pirates, launderers, and tuna's black market 225
The Future Economy
Dalian, China Port of Call: A Japanese mogul plots to take the world's last sushi frontier 253
Epilogue Tokyo, Japan Raw Deals 269
Acknowledgments 283
Notes 291
Bibliography 301
Index 309
The new sushi economy has challenged the way we see the globe. Food has always been a point of negotiation between people and their environment (...) When we eat seafood, we stick indelibly to the idea that it must be better, fresher, the closer the restaurant is to the water (...) Jewelry stores, after all, don't set up near quarries.
In the sushi economy, power (and culture) does not flow downward from the boardrooms (...) Instead, the agents of change have been individuals, who have created unlikely linkages across hemispheres in an era of new mobility.
"You're trying to tell me that tuna would sell in Japan? Who'd eat such fish?"
A fisherman's reply to two Japanese businessmen on Canada's eastern province in October 1971.
Bluefin, it turned out, were a long-standing nuisance to the cod fishermen, who oten found their nets ruined by the tuna enmeshed in them.
All the Japanese fish auctions share on trait: They are among a technologically advanced country's most materially abckward institutions.
If an economist were given the challenge of designing a sales mechanism for the volume of whole, fresh tuna that runs trough Tsukiji, it is likely that he would come up with something pretty close to what happens there already. In fact, it is hard to imagine any other method working at all.
Trought the 1960s, to most Americans, fish was something that could be canned, battered, fried, grilled, steamed, broiled, roasted - but certainly not served raw.
...open-mindeness toward foreign cuisine, health consciousness, an aestheticization of natural foods, and a belief in the perfectibility of the human physique trough diet mixed perfectly in Southern California.
The future of the U.S. seafood industry lay not in factories but in its ability to reach foreign markets.
The price paid to fishermen for tuna crossed a dollar per pound in 1978 and skyrocketed during the 1980s. The strong Japanese economy and a perennially anemic dollar conspired by the early 1990s to drive the average daily high price of northern bluefin sold at Tsukiji to nearly $40 per pound.
Culturally, sushi denotes a certain type of material sophistication, a declaration that we are rich enough not to be impressed by volume and refined enough to savor good things in small doses.
More than any other food, possibly more than any other commodity, to eat sushi is to display an access to advanced trade networks, of full engagement in world commerce. It also demonstrates faith in the local authority of safe food-handling, a vote of confidence in the responsibility of government and the credibility of local business.