Sushi and Sustainability

One of my strategies for eating out with friends and family has been to persuade them to eat at Japanese restaurants. Until recently, I could always order sushi and know that I would be served a biocide-free meal. Not any more. I noticed a change a while back. At first I thought it was the soy sauce, but I’ve slowly come to accept that farmed fish contain biocides.

A few years ago, David Suzuki gave a talk at my daughter’s school. He seemed peeved and answered the students’ questions sharply. They didn’t take to him. One of the teachers said that Suzuki had been in conflict with the school, which advocated fish farming as a way of boosting the local economy. Suzuki adamantly refused to support their efforts. They argued that fish farming would protect the oceans from overfishing; he argued that it would spread diseases to Pacific fish and destroy the only remaining wild runs of salmon. The disagreement had become contentious.

In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro says that sushi should be unaffordable–that the reason for overfishing is that sushi is cheap and available everywhere—even in places like supermarkets and bars. Fortunately for me, I have access to fish taken from well-managed Pacific Northwest fisheries that seem—so far—to be sustainable. I’ve also eaten fish farmed in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour, where they swim in pristine barometric tides.

After a recent sushi meal that caused unmistakable neurotoxicity, I remembered that sustainability advocates were raising provocative questions about the sustainability—or, rather, were pointing out that no one knows how to define it. From my point of view, fish farming isn’t sustainable if it spreads diseases or poisons our species–or any species.

I don’t eat as much sushi as I used to and plan to eat less in the future. But I’m not ready to give it up and am grateful to those chefs who are willing to serve plates of biocide-free, sustainably caught fish. In that vein, I’d like to send out a big thank you to the servers and chefs at Kisaku, Maneki and Sushi Kappo Tamura!