Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Restaurants Is your sushi sustainable?
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:46 PM
The Utne Reader's website features an article about two chefs who have opened sustainable sushi bars. The article summarizes the five most endangered fish:
Take salmon, number one in U.S. popularity. Wild fish are pricier than farmed, and aquacultured salmon are voracious feeders, crowded like factory hogs in filthy ocean farms. Ditto hamachi, also known as amberjack. Most wild shrimp are bottom-trawled, a practice as devastating as slash-and-burn, while farming shrimp often entails ecological destruction. Unagi, freshwater eel, are snatched and penned young before they can breed, then fattened on wild fish. And the numbers of bluefin tuna, which is nearly always wild caught, are crashing about as precipitously as stock prices.
A bigger problem with the five—dubbed the toxic five—is that they also tend to be a sushi bar’s biggest profit makers. Meaning that, even if a chef wanted to do the right thing and banish them, the economics of the sushi bar are skewed in favor of keeping them in the case.
It's pretty amazing how much sushi Americans are eating:
In 2007 Americans picked up chopsticks and dipped 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a figure capped with a question mark: Is sushi as we know it—from prepacked supermarket rolls to exquisite omakase meals—doomed, inevitably, to extinction?
Consider the face of most American sushi: It is the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like meat lover’s pizza and the Croissan’wich, monster maki were born in the USA, for people with a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins and no fear of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originate.
“We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach for Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “Look at how Americans eat shrimp. Forty years ago, you most likely ate five shrimp a year, probably in a shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve. Now we just gorge on them whenever we want. Some things simply should not be all you can eat, and fish is one of them.”
The article was written by John Birdsall and was excerpted from Edible San Francisco.
Comments (10)
Showing 1-10 of 10
Where did you get your information on salmon farms? I went on a salmon farm tour in BC this summer and they are nothing like you discribe. The farms are clean, densities are low and the fish look healthy. The farms are ISO Environmental Management system certified and I was very impressed. Maybe you should visit one and see for yourself before judging?
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There are many farms trying to do the right thing with producing clean salmon. The problem is once they go to market who can tell which is which? The consumer and the restaurant has a responsibilty to know what they are buying. On top of all that, even if all farm raised salmon were perfectly healthy and happy, the fact remains that for every pound of salmon it takes three pounds of fish for feeding. That is definately not sustainable.
Well, seems all we eat technically is not sustainable... guess we should all just give up the ghost. and i love the comment in the last quote - we shouldn't be allowed to eat as much fish as we want. I guess supply and demand was never taught to this person, but rather she learned only the wonderful benefits of dictatorial systems.
Who are you addressing, Lynne? I didn't write the material. It's quoted from a story in the Utne Reader. And there's a link, so you can answer your question.
Brian, the point of the article in general is that the demand for fish is quickly outpacing our supply, and the point of that final quote in particular is that people should eat more responsibly -- for the sake of their own health as well as for the preservation of what supply we have. Also, why did you assume that the writer was a woman? The last line of the article cites the writer as John Birdsall. I'm not sure whether your assumption offends me more on behalf of dudes or ladies.
Actually, Lauren, my point is supply and demand works out. And it is why it costs more for good sushi and has only gotten more expensive. But, I presume Laurne falls into the camp of 'its ok for someone else to always be telling us what we can and cannot do'. As for the good health bit, I have never heard someone having bad health for eating too many shrimp. Maybe fried shrimp, but not shrimp in general. I could see the argument in regards to fast food - but not shrimp or fish. As for the person writing it, I read it as Joan. My mistake. I did learn to read in Georgia after all, so I'm a little slow. My my, everyone is so touchy lately. I guess I will have to start using "weman" as my pronoun going forward. But that might offend eunichs.... Huh. I will think on that.
Michael Pollan, among many others, has made the point that we now treat food that used to be reserved for special occasions like part of our daily diet. This doesn't just exhaust resources, it's also generally a reason obesity has skyrocketed.
I'd argue that most of the "special occasion" foods have become dramatically more affordable, thus we can eat more. Point earlier is, I could make the same argument for replacing fish with read meat or any other food (pesticides on the grass to feed the cows, land for all the cows, the poo that goes into the rivers, etc, etc). Nothing we consume is truly "sustainable". The only thing that might qualify is full on organic, and true real organic, and that would not come close to being able to feed the world's population.
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