I was recently asked this question by a visitor to my site. Personally, I might have to go with the futomaki, which translates literally as “fat roll.”

Most of the oversized sushi rolls that we eat in America were invented right here in the States. Typically, traditional Japanese sushi is made small. But the futomaki is an exception. It’s usually overstuffed with a surprising variety of ingredients, including simmered vegetables and mushrooms, tamago (egg), and perhaps boiled shrimp. In Japan, futomaki don’t show up much at traditional sushi bars, but rather appear at more informal venues, such as picnics.

The problem is that when a futomaki is sliced into pieces, it becomes nearly impossible to eat, at least with any sense of decorum. The slices are usually too big to fit in your mouth all at once, but when you try to bite them in half, the fillings fall apart and tumble onto your plate, or worse, your lap.

It turns out that a better way to eat a futomaki is actually what you see here, demonstrated by this famished salaryman sneaking a quick lunch at the office. No slicing necessary.

By Trevor Corson

With the ongoing tragedy in Japan, people have been asking me if sushi is safe to eat, and indeed, whether the future of sushi as a cuisine might be in jeopardy. Let me first say that the situation in Japan is heartbreaking, and I have many close friends there who I’ve been in contact with and whose safety I’m concerned about. The question of sushi’s future seems peripheral to all this, and yet for those wondering from afar about risks to their own health, it’s a fair thing to ask.

While sushi began in Japan as a snack made of small seasonal fish and shellfish from local Japanese waters, now, for better or worse, it’s become a globalized, decentralized industry. Here in the United States that means a typical mid-range sushi restaurant is likely to be serving mass-produced ingredients sourced not necessarily from Japan at all, but from all over the planet.

For example, an average piece of tuna might have been deep-frozen on a factory ship on the high seas weeks or months ago and never come close to Japan on its journey to our plates. Salmon is purchased from aquaculture operators off Chile and Canada. The bulk of the freshwater eel referred to as unagi comes from industrial farms in China.

Much of the fish listed on sushi menus as hamachi—often called yellowtail in English but more accurately referred to as amberjack—originates from floating pens off southwestern Japan. Even these fish farms, however, are hundreds of miles away from the stricken nuclear reactors northeast of Tokyo.

Higher-end sushi bars are more likely to have incurred the expense of regularly sourcing seafood directly from local Japanese fisheries, and much of this seafood passes through the central Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. But should serious connoisseurs be worried?

A few days ago The New York Times interviewed Tsukiji’s general manager and reported that before the earthquake, only about a tenth of the seafood sold there came from the northeast. Now think of the scenes we’ve been seeing of boats and ships resting on the tops of buildings. The tsunami wiped out the entire region’s fishing and seafood distribution system. Fish from that part of Japan are no longer being caught, and won’t be anytime soon.

In the short term,  smart sushi chefs here will be ensuring that their seafood comes from other places, and will advertise the fact—indeed, they might not have much choice, as the FDA slows seafood shipments from Japan as a precaution. This might lead to some scarcity and perhaps slighly higher prices, but so far it doesn’t seem as if it will be terribly disruptive, even for higher-end establishments. Several chefs I know at top-quality sushi bars already prefer to serve a slice of fluke from, say, Long Island over similar fish from Japan anyway, because the fish is fresher.

Yet worries will linger, particularly if the nuclear crisis in Japan worsens. In the longer term, can sushi as a cuisine survive this?

Many of the artisanal skills associated with Japanese cuisine have already jumped the boundaries of Japan and taken root elsewhere. American farmers are growing high-quality sushi rice in California, and the exceptional wasabi served at many of my Sushi Concierge dinners comes from Oregon. A better alternative to Japanese farmed hamachi is being raised in Hawaii. And some of the finest Japanese miso in the world today is being produced not in Japan but in western Massachusetts.

The fact is, though, that sushi has already been facing an existential crisis for some time, well before the earthquake and its tragic aftermath. We’ve all been devouring so many of those industrially-harvested low-end fish—tuna, salmon, hamachi, and unagi—and high-end trophy fish—bluefin in particular—that sushi hasn’t been a sustainable cuisine.

And that’s not to mention the health risks inherent in all these types of seafood that we’ve already been living with. All of these fish accumulate various kinds of toxins which we then ingest, from methyl mercury to PCBs to old-fashioned chemical pollutants.

The irony is that none of these types of seafood is a traditional Japanese sushi fish. With or without Japan’s current disaster, if we want sushi to survive long-term we’ll need to return to a more traditional approach to eating it, which is what I’ve been advocating with my Sushi Concierge dinners all along. This means asking chefs to make us sushi concocted from a more healthful and wider variety of smaller, more seasonal, more naturally procured fish that are lower on the food chain, along with shellfish and vegetables that are more local in origin. These are more interesting to eat anyway.

Let’s hope for the radiation leaks in Japan to be contained as soon as possible. After that, a situation that forces both the makers and eaters of sushi to diversify and simplify might not be a bad thing, taking sushi back to its roots—perhaps not necessarily to the particular fish of affected waters off Japan but to the philosophy that inspired the cuisine in the first place.

A version of this post was first published on The Atlantic.

By Trevor Corson

Just wrapped up an amazing guided dinner for six at the sushi bar, and the chef and I received a phenomenal compliment from a British gentleman who was part of the group. “In my 20-plus years here,” he said, “this has been one of the great New York nights.” 

By Trevor Corson

Last night’s Sushi Concierge dinner in D.C. featured a cut-open nigiri of salt-cured king prawn, under which, between the prawn and the rice, the chef had tucked a dab of the prawn’s own tomalley, augmented with white miso. I love opening people’s eyes to the imagination and technique that a good sushi chef is capable of bringing to the cuisine—if we know how to ask for it. Sushi chefs are like jazz musicians, waiting to be heard.

(Photo courtesy of Gourmet Traveller.)

By Trevor Corson

“I was skeptical,” he later admitted. “What could this guy teach me about sushi that I didn’t already know?” Jack’s daughter-in-law, who’d arranged the dinner, was holding her breath.

Jack had been eating at fine sushi bars for decades, and he was already familiar with many of the etiquette tips that frequently come as news to sushi lovers. But I worked hard to win Jack over with my arsenal of insider sushi knowledge, and at the end of the meal he clapped me on the shoulder. “You passed the test!”

Phew. What Jack liked was that now he knew the whys behind his approach to eating sushi. And he discovered that with this additional knowledge, he’d now been able to appreciate higher levels of the chef’s skill and savor some of the best sushi he’d ever encountered.

This morning Jack’s daughter-in-law emailed me in thanks: “You were a true gem!” That certainly was a nice compliment to receive, but I couldn’t do my educational part of it without the exquisite culinary mastery of the chefs who collaborate so patiently with me and my clients.

One the treats Jack and his family enjoyed last night was the unusual delicacy of nigiri topped with a handful of tiny white shrimp from Japan’s Toyama Bay (pictured above; live shrimp at left). Just one of the many examples of real sushi that most chefs won’t prepare for you—partly because it’s painstaking work, and partly because it can take a degree of sophistication to appreciate, which for a chef can make it a risky item to serve. I consider it part of my job to help bridge that divide.

By Trevor Corson

Discover the delights of an old-fashioned, traditional Japanese sushi menu that prizes the more authentic sushi fish—and skips the endangered tunas pushed by the globalized, industrial fishing and restaurant industries—by attending one of my Sushi Concierge dinners. Bluefin tuna and the risks faced by this majestic fish from overfishing were the subject of a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

The Times article quoted a co-owner of the global sushi chain Nobu named Ritchie Notar, who rationalized the chain’s ongoing exploitation of bluefin by saying, “We are dealing with thousands of years of cultural customs.” Actually, the Japanese along with the rest of us have only started going ga-ga for bluefin toro in the past few decades, and as the Times article points out, tuna sushi didn’t even exist until about 170 years ago. Moreover, as I discuss at my dinner lectures, even then tuna was a trash fish for the Japanese, considered unfit for high-class sushi until well into the twentieth century. (I’ve written more about this here.) Only recently has the globalization boom turned bluefin into a big moneymaker.

To provide some perspective on such claims by the Nobu chain, the author of the Times article, Paul Greenberg, next describes one of my Sushi Concierge dinners in New York:

Trevor Corson is an East Asia scholar turned popular nonfiction writer and author of the 2007 book The Story of Sushi, and for select groups he will act as a “sushi concierge,” hosting dinners often at the Jewel Bako Japanese restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, one of which I attended this past winter. A Corson-guided meal aims to reveal the historical truth of tuna and to represent the very different fish that were the staples of sushi in earlier times. Plate by plate I watched as Corson walked a group of Manhattan professionals through a traditional Edo-period meal of snappers, jacks and other white-fleshed, smaller fish that most definitely did not include “red” tuna.

I’ve taken the Nobu chain to task about this before; I feel sad that Nobu Matsuhisa, perhaps the most successful Japanese sushi chef in the world, seems to have forgotten some of his own traditions.

One sushi dinner at a time, I’m trying to help bring back the forgotten culinary values of this delightful cuisine, and in the process help provide some relief for the world’s most majestic fish. Do join me.

Photo by Kenji Aoki for the New York Times.

By Trevor Corson

I recently spent a few hours behind the scenes with the sushi chefs at the Michelin-starred Jewel Bako restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village, where I host my Sushi Concierge dinner lectures, watching them prepare during a busy morning and afternoon. Here, Chef Yuzo trims fillets of a variety of small, traditional sushi fish. If you’re curious what else goes on behind the scenes in a sushi restaurant, I’ve posted more photos.

One acquaintance of mine who is a sushi chef commented, after clicking through these photos, “How satisfying. I don’t smoke, but I could use a cigarette right about now.”

By Trevor Corson

Undergoing an organ transplant can change everything; for one young man I met last year, the consequences of his upcoming lung transplant would include a restriction against eating raw fish for the rest of his life. With that in mind, his friends organized a Sushi Concierge dinner for him last fall, and I had the singular honor of presiding over his “last supper” of sushi, forever.

I just learned that last week he underwent the surgery for his double lung replacement. A friend of his told me that a few days before the operation, they were reminiscing about that great final meal of sushi.

The operation looks to have been a success. What wonderful news, and a most welcome reminder that, as easy as it is to become obsessed with pleasures like sushi, there is so much more to life.

By Trevor Corson

The blogger Gastro Chic showed up to attend one of my recent “Sushi Concierge” dinner lectures and has just posted a lovely, detailed review of the evening. She writes:

Before you sharpen those chopsticks (a sushi bar no-no, by the way), settle down and have a sushi meal as it would have been eaten by a Japanese connoisseur 70 or 80 years ago. What’s not on the throwback menu may surprise you: no tuna, no hamachi, no yellowtail and no unagi. But what about toro, supposedly the king of the sushi bar? Nope. Corson explained that despite the hype, toro is actually a very recent addition to the sushi menu …

Read the whole review.

Photo by Gastro Chic.

By Trevor Corson

Feeling happy this morning: Last night I hosted a private dinner at Jewel Bako for a gentleman named Eric and his wife Michelle, to celebrate her birthday. They were both pretty experienced sushi eaters, but Michelle in particular had been playing it safe over the years.

To Eric’s great delight, Michelle ended up trying things Eric had been encouraging her to try for a long time: her first raw shrimp, her first raw scallop, her first piece of raw octopus, and her first saltwater eel. And, for two people who didn’t like mackerel, they both ended up complimenting the chef on a special old-fashioned mackerel preparation.

At the end of the meal, Michelle said that with someone there to talk over the menu in Japanese with the chef, explain everything as it was served, and build her trust in the chef and the ingredients, she’d felt more confident getting out of her comfort zone. Success!

This is why I love being a Sushi Concierge, it’s gratifying. Even Eric, the more experienced one, commented that he was taking away a list of new things he’d learned about the cuisine and eating at the sushi bar.

The only trouble, as Eric complained to me at the end, was that “now it’s going to be awfully hard to go back to eating our regular sushi.”

By Trevor Corson

Being a sushi guidance counselor is hard work—last night I hosted a nearly 3-hour dinner for ten guests (okay, I admit they were delightful) at my Monday-night dinner class series at Jewel Bako restaurant. But there are some perks. I don’t get to eat during the meal, but the maître d’ wouldn’t let me leave without taking a box of sushi home myself. Score.

The sushi in the picture—what the maître d’ insisted on sending me home with in a box, so I couldn’t really argue with him when I opened it up back home—is a more standard fare compared with the Sushi Concierge menu that I arrange for my guests and clients, which skews away from the tunas and fattier farmed fish towards lighter, leaner, and more traditional ingredients, which—bonus—tend to be more healthful and, though not perfectly so, often more sustainable, too.

What a great way to end the day. Hungry?

By Trevor Corson

Today, bluefin tuna is considered the pinnacle of fine sushi, especially bluefin toro—the fatty belly cuts of the fish. This is kind of funny, because just a few decades ago the Japanese considered toro such a disgusting part of the tuna that the only people who would eat it were impoverished manual laborers. And prior to about the 1920s, no self-respecting Japanese person would eat any kind of tuna at all if they could possibly avoid it. Tuna was so despised in Japan that all tuna species qualified for an official term of disparagement: gezakana, or “inferior fish.”

In the old days in Japan, if you had no choice but to eat tuna you’d do everything you could do get rid of the bloody metallic taste of the fresh red meat. One trick was to bury the tuna in the ground for four days so that the muscle would actually ferment, which led to tuna being called by the nickname shibi—literally, “four days.”

Not until the 1840s did an unintentional bumper crop of bluefin in Japan cause sushi makers to try to sell the fish at all, and these were rather pathetic street vendors catering to the lowest classes. They did their best to mask the inherent flavor of the flesh by smothering the red flesh in soy sauce and marinating it for as long as possible. Even today, purveyors that handle bluefin may soak it in ice water all night in an attempt to expunge the less desirable components of the fish’s smell.

The arrival of refrigeration technology made it possible to distribute tuna more widely, and as people gradually grew used to seeing the red meat of tuna on sushi, disdain for the fish decreased. But the fatty cuts of the fish were still considered garbage. There are reports that tuna belly was a common ingredient in Japanese cat food.

After World War II, with the American Occupation and the influx of Western culture into Japan, the Japanese began eating a more Westernized diet, including red meat and fattier cuts of it, which paved the way for the acceptance of tuna and toro in more recent decades in both Japan and the West.

But the current bluefin fad—Atlantic bluefin in particular—remains a historical anomaly, and one partly manufactured deliberately, for corporate profit. During the heyday of Japan’s export economy, Japanese airline cargo executives promoted Atlantic bluefin for sushi so they’d have something to fill their planes up with on the flight from East Coast US cities back to Tokyo. And as the recent documentary film The End of the Line has reported, Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the largest bluefin distributors in the world, now appears to be stockpiling massive amounts of bluefin in enormous high-tech deep freezers so it can make a killing dolling them at inflated prices out after the wild fish is all but gone.

Back in Japan you can still find a few old-school sushi aficionados who disdain bluefin toro. They’ll tell you that toro is child’s play. Anyone can enjoy that simplistic, melt-in-your-mouth succulence, they say. It takes the real skill of a connoisseur to appreciate the more subtle and complex tastes and textures of the traditional kings of the sushi bar—delicate whitefish like flounder and sea bream being some of the best, along with mackerels, jacks, clams, squid, and other types of shellfish that have been popular all along. Personally, I won’t eat bluefin anymore, and I don’t miss it at all. My sushi eating experiences have actually become more interesting as a result.

This post was first published on The Atlantic.

By Trevor Corson

Some days I think the most influential Japanese chef in America might actually have been John Belushi.

If you’ve seen Belushi’s “Samurai Delicatessen” skit, originally performed on Saturday Night Live in 1976, you’ll remember him channeling a touchy Japanese chef, perpetually on the verge of violence, who screamed out loud while slicing ingredients with a sword.

Belushi’s character was a riot, but would you really want him making your lunch? Apparently, for many sushi lovers in America, the answer is “yes.”

Consider this inquiry I received from a reader named Peter the other day:

Does etiquette permit a customer to request sushi without any wasabi? I’ve always been afraid to ask. … There are those famous sushi chefs who kick you out of the restaurant.

Here we have a patron with a simple request—no different, in fact, from a customer at a deli who asks that his sandwich be “very lean on the corned beef,” as the customer does in Belushi’s “Samurai Delicatessen.”

Yet poor Peter is genuinely terrified that the chef will banish him for his insolence, if not disembowel him with a fish knife.

It seems to me that no dining experience should involve this much fear. Unless you’re deliberately after a plate of poisonous blowfish. But as Peter’s comment reveals, many sushi chefs in America have built reputations by inspiring just such dread.

Chief among these is probably Kazunori Nozawa in Los Angeles, whose habit of ejecting customers for minor infractions of etiquette earned him the nickname “the Sushi Nazi”—a formulation borrowed from a popular episode of Seinfeld that featured a dictatorial soup vendor called “the Soup Nazi.”

Every profession has its share of nitpickers and curmudgeons. So why have Nozawa and his ilk acquired such fame? Last fall, the Wall Street Journal even published a report about them called “The Sushi Bullies.” The article claimed that such behavior is the norm in Japan.

But the article also quoted a Japanese chef and instructor named Toshi Sugiura who said quite the opposite—that traditionally, sushi chefs are trained to be polite and friendly, like neighborhood bartenders. So which is true? Is the caricature of the crazy samurai chef based in reality or not?

Sugiura is someone I happen to know well, having spent several months watching him work behind his sushi bar. He has a forceful personality, but he’s more monk than samurai—he wins you over with his warmth. He inspires his American customers to follow proper etiquette, and eat authentic sushi, without threatening anyone with eviction. In fact, his customers are his pals, and the atmosphere at his sushi bar can be delightful and even boisterous.

My own experience of Japanese chefs in Japan, acquired while residing there for several years and eating sushi with Japanese friends at their favorite sushi bars, was that they were more like friendly neighborhood bartenders than surly samurai.

There’s a well-known short story in Japan called “Sushi,” written in 1939 by Kanoko Okamoto, that gives a sense of what a typical old-school sushi bar ought to be like. The chef knows his customers by name and remembers what each one likes to eat and in what order. The atmosphere is relaxed, sometimes even silly.

Why, then, do we assume that Japanese chefs should be tyrants, and that we should put up with their reign of terror, and even reward it? Maybe it’s because we believe we’re getting something authentic. We conjure up a vision of the stern Japanese warrior and feel obliged to become his supplicants. If that’s the case, I can think of a word that describes this impulse well: masochism.

I’d rather enjoy good food along with good company and be treated with respect and perhaps even a dose of charm. Chefs like Sugiura are proof it’s possible for a sushi master to educate Americans into the finer points of their tradition without making us feel like juvenile delinquents.

I’d even argue that sushi chefs ignore at their peril the fact that the relationship between restaurateurs and customers should be a two-way street.

Take bluefin tuna. Most sushi chefs are still blindly serving it, but consumers are waking up to the fact that it’s becoming an endangered fish. I myself won’t eat bluefin anymore. But does etiquette permit a customer to request sushi without it?

It certainly ought to, and even the most stubborn of chefs had better listen. Because if they don’t, sooner or later they’ll lose business to the hip new sushi joint next door that just started serving a menu of sustainable seafood.

As for requesting sushi with less wasabi, wouldn’t it be nice if our friend Peter could feel comfortable enough to ask without fearing for his life? Because then he might learn from his friendly neighborhood chef that sushi with less wasabi is actually the more authentic choice.

“Sushi with too much wasabi is just bad sushi,” the chef would say, smiling. “Here, try this piece, I’ve made it with just the right amount of wasabi—only a tiny bit.”

And if Peter still felt it was too much for him, the chef could act like that chef in the Japanese short story, and say, “Okay, from now on, I’ll remember to put almost no wasabi at all in your sushi.”

And probably, Peter would keep going back to that sushi bar for the rest of his life.

John Belushi was a comedic genius. For my money, the samurai chef shouldn’t be something to fear. It should remain, as Belushi intended, something to laugh at.

Screen shot at top: Saturday Night Live on Hulu.com.

This post was first published on The Atlantic.

By Trevor Corson

Big things are happening this summer for a big fish. If conservationists get their way, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, a majestic swimmer that’s long been overharvested for the sushi trade, may soon receive protection as an endangered species. Many sushi lovers are understandably upset, because they don’t want to give up their favorite meal.

But I sit down for a sushi meal at some of the best restaurants in America almost every week – as part of my efforts to educate Americans about sushi tradition – and I can safely say that giving up sushi altogether to save the bluefin would be a terrible idea. In fact, the plight of the bluefin is an opportunity for us to enjoy better sushi than ever.

The bluefin tuna is a tiger of the sea, with glistening red flesh that can fetch tens of thousands of dollars per fish. As sushi has spread across America and around the globe, the bluefin has been decimated.

The situation is so dire that efforts to protect the fish are finally gaining traction.

In May, a group of celebrities, including Sting, Elle Macpherson, and Charlize Theron, spoke out against the consumption of bluefin, and in June, Prince Albert of Monaco spearheaded a commitment to list the Atlantic population as an endangered species.

In July, Nicolas Sarkozy pledged France’s support, followed immediately by leaders in Britain. And earlier this month, a former Japanese fisheries minister declared that even the Japanese will have to get used to eating a lot less bluefin. Now the media and blogosphere are alight with talk of culinary doom.

The end of sushi, it seems, is upon us.

But such talk could hurt the bluefin even more.

Sushi connoisseurs tend to be obsessive folks – I know because I am one. If we think we must sacrifice good sushi to save the bluefin, we may just as well keep eating bluefin.

Indeed, the best-known sushi chef in the world, Nobu Matsuhisa, has refused to remove Atlantic bluefin from his 24 luxury eateries around the globe, despite increasing pressure from activists, because he believes connoisseurs won’t dine in his restaurants without it. A Nobu spokesman pledged to list the fish on Nobu’s London menu as “endangered,” but the company then reneged, calling it only “environmentally threatened.”

Chef Nobu may have forgotten the special joys of his own tradition. I wish he would join me for one of my educational sushi dinners to be reminded what makes a sushi lover a true connoisseur.

The people who come to my dinners are American sushi eaters ready to experience and understand a completely authentic Japanese meal. I work with Japanese master chefs, and we provide sushi as it was served in Tokyo in the old days.

And guess what? There’s no bluefin on the plate. There’s no toro, no hamachi, no unagi, and no fatty salmon. None of these usual suspects of today’s global sushi business are part of the traditional sushi lineage. In fact, until just a few decades ago the Japanese considered tuna a garbage fish.

It wasn’t until after World War II, when the Japanese started eating a more Westernized diet, with red meat and fattier cuts of it, that the bluefin fad began. And it was a fad practically invented by Japanese airlines, so they could load their international flights with pricey cargo.

Instead, my dinner guests and I savor the old-school kings of the sushi bar – smaller, lighter, leaner, and more local fish and shellfish that have more interesting flavors and textures.

These items can take some getting used to, and require knowledge about what to look for and how to appreciate it. But I’ve never met a sushi lover who didn’t want to acquire more expertise and experience with the authentic sushi tradition.

My guests finish dinner entranced by their new awareness and these new tastes. In Japan, the most hard-core aficionados pass over the fatty cuts of bluefin, considering them too simplistic a pleasure. Once you experience sushi’s full range, you begin to understand why.

Perhaps the most significant development for bluefin in recent days was a little-noticed event this month in Seattle.

A Japanese chef named Hajime Sato did what celebrity chef Nobu has not had the wisdom to do. With the help of a seafood conservation expert named Casson Trenor, Chef Sato converted his sushi bar, Mashiko, to an entirely sustainable menu.

Although a few other sustainable sushi bars have sprung up in recent months, this was a first for a Japanese chef in America – perhaps anywhere.

Sato no longer serves bluefin. And he’s thrilled. “I found probably 20 more fish that no one uses for sushi anymore,” he says. “My restaurant has so much more different fish that I can’t fit them all into the new menu.”

Sushi doesn’t need to die because the bluefin is endangered. With our help, sushi can be reborn – better than ever.

This post was originally published by the Christian Science Monitor/Yahoo News.

By Trevor Corson

According to some insider info I received recently from a Japanese fish distributor, we can expect the price of hamachi—farmed yellowtail, a sushi favorite—to rise in the near future. The cause: a massive epidemic of red tide that is ravaging Japanese hamachi farms. Details on the red tide epidemic below.

(Red tide is scary stuff—a thousand times more deadly than cyanide. I’ve written more about it in the New York Times.)

Hamachi is not a fish I ever feature in my Sushi Concierge classes and dinners anyway—it’s one of the “usual suspects” of contemporary global sushi that I avoid. Hamachi owes its popularity not to the fact that it’s a traditional sushi topping, but rather to the fact that, like industrially farmed salmon, it’s overfed and underexercised to an unnatural degree to satisfy our modern demand for fat. It’s cloying and oily, probably carrying toxins, and was never considered particularly appealing by traditional sushi aficionados.

As I write in The Story of Sushi:

Hamachi farmers feed the fry three or four times a day. The tiny fish quickly grow to a hundred times their initial weight. The farmers vaccinate the fish, because disease is a constant danger under crowded conditions, just as on salmon farms. Then the fish are transfered into floating pens.

Disease isn’t the only problem. Humans like to eat yellowtail, but yellowtail also like to eat yellowtail, which makes them a tricky species to manage. At night, when the fish stop swimming and drift at the surface, the farmers cull through them and segregate them into different pens by size, so the big fish don’t gobble up the smaller ones.

Every day the farmers fire feed pellets out of a canon into the pens. The feed pellets are similar to the ones salmon farmers use, packed with ground-up fatty fish such as mackerel, herring, sardines, and anchovies, often along with extra doses of oils and vitamins.

The yellowtail eat so much of this feed, and get so little exercise, that the excessive amounts of fat they accumulate actually weaken the matrix of connective collagen fibers that holds their muscles together. That’s why farmed yellowtail is so soft.

Independent researchers have conducted thorough investigations into farmed salmon, revealing that the fish accumulate much higher levels of PCBs from their feed than wild salmon. So far, yellowtail have not been the subject of similar studies, even though lots of people eat high-fat farmed yellowtail in sushi. It would not be surprising if farmed yellowtail have the same problem.

Most yellowtail served in sushi—regardless of the region, type of restaurant, or price the customer pays—come from the same cluster of yellowtail farms, located off the coast of western Japan.

And due to the red tide epidemic, these farms are in trouble. Here’s the insider info I received from the fish distributor, who also talks about “CO”—carbon monoxide—which is widely used in the sushi industry to gas tuna and yellowtail to make it look red after it’s already lost its natural color:

Subject: Massive Death of Hamachi caused by Red Tide

The below is an email I received from a shipper in Japan which explain how this on-going incident might affect Hamachi production/price in near future:
One area has lost 240,000 ps of 2-3 years old Hamachi because of current red tide, and this is where [distributor names] have been sourcing their frozen Hamachi.

Other areas have been hit as well. … The scary part is that this red tide hasn’t been contained, still out there and nobody knows what happens next. …
I feel bad enough for those small Hamachi farmers. They’ve been struggling for years, just barely surviving, but now this natural disaster is hitting them.

About two weeks ago, the guy who has patent on treating Tuna loins with CO just won a case against CO Hamachi packer. People in the industry thought that all other CO Hamachi processors will be in trouble because this guy has been making his living by suing companies. … I didn’t let you guys know about this because I don’t think we need to worry about [distributor names], etc. losing battle against this guy and [distributor name]’s CO Hamachi will become unavailable, or cost gets higher. This guy sued me over three years ago for moving CO treated Tuna in 2003-2004 and my lawyer took care of it and no damage at all. Just like my case, I don’t think a potential lawsuit will do any harm to [distributor names], etc. for sourcing their CO Hamachi.

However, this red tide is different. In Japan, red tide of this magnitude has never occurred, but this year’s much-more-than-normal rain falls and higher air temperature have cause red tide to be formed at a scale which unheard of. Two possible trends to take place soon; 1) The market price will jump; 2) Farmers will harvest remaining Hamachi immediately and turn them into case, or keep them in freezers for later processing. One way of another, Hamachi price has to rise soon, because now Hamachi farmers have to pay higher insurance premiums to feel secure about their inventories.