At long last, there are now sustainable seafood cards for sushi. (Well, almost: The Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Blue Ocean Institute, and Environmental Defense Fund will jointly release their cards at the end of October at Tataki Sushi in San Francisco, which Monterey Bay’s director calls the country’s only fully sustainable sushi restaurant.) The existing sustainable seafood guides weren’t much help if you were considering ordering sea urchin roe, and now, if you look at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s list, which ChewsWise’s Samuel Fromartz tracked down, you’ll be comforted by the fact that uni’s a best choice.
Assuming it comes from Canada, that is. California’s uni is only a good alternative, and uni from Maine should simply be avoided. Got that? All of which is to say: This isn’t obvious. And it’d be a lot easier if restaurants took the burden of sustainability on themselves, as Fromartz points out. But they’re not. So you’re stuck asking if the tuna was pole-caught or not. And shouldn’t that piss all of us off more than it does? Just asking.
Right. Ask the sushi dude if the tuna was pole-caught. “No, I freakin’ arm-wrestled a shark for it.” I’m not sure the chef would be aware of the provenance of the fish in most cases.
The sushi chefs I deal with generally know the provenance. As to the how and whether they’re endangered is another matter. I, personally, would love to see Toronto graduate to the B.C. head of the class by following their lead. Sushi is my guilty pleasure, as I’m an environmentalist. I have to say I’d like a whole lot more pleasure and much less guilt.
The concept of sustainability as applied to sushi – the food of a culture and nation that has continuously depleted the entire world’s oceans of fish they found to be delicious – is pretty absurd. But the Japanese have no illusions – they pay absolute top dollar for the diminishing stock of deliciousness, and they continue their search for alternatives – they’re picky – but they’re realists.
Americanized sushi, otoh, is a market replete with the standard American penchant for lowest common denominator foodstuffs, served cheaply, without regard to either tradition or future sourcing. Blue Fin and Big Eye have long since gone from our Chinese restaurant sushi places, replaced by ahi – after all, served with cream cheese and mayo, it doesn’t taste much different. Farmed Atlantic Salmon – the number 2 fish in these places (never served in Japan) – another fine example of how we care about sustainability in our sushi. So I guess that a few dudes and dudettes in cali-lala-land feel that American sushi ought to be sustainable, huh? How about maybe American sushi ought to be sushi, first.