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

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

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

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.