In John Hughes’ smash 1985 film, The Breakfast Club, five teenagers
from different social cliques spend a Saturday together in detention.
There is the jock, whose identity is wrapped up in athletic
achievement. There is the nerd, who is book smart and socially awkward.
There is the moody basket case who wears black and broods about death.
There is the equally moody rebel, who smokes and swears and defies
authority. And there is the princess, whose clothes are hot, whose
manners are cold, and whose lunch speaks volumes about the rarified
social atmosphere in which she moves. While the others bring sandwiches
– if they bring anything at all — she brings sushi, elegantly
arranged on a fragile Japanese dish. The others don’t even recognize
what she’s eating, and when she explains what sushi is — "rice, raw
fish and seaweed" — the rebel mocks her for her willingness to eat it.
Using
food to trace the rigidly hierarchical world of American teen culture,
the scene expects the audience to see sushi as fundamentally alien,
exclusive and unappetizing. The Breakfast Club asserts that
sushi-eating symbolizes a distasteful elitism that we all recognize,
but that we do not ourselves create, maintain or like.
Such
symbolism would never work today. In the short decades since Hughes’
hit film, sushi has become a staple of American culture, a familiar,
accessible and immensely desirable food that can be found in
supermarket aisles and fast food outlets as well as high-end
restaurants. Far from signaling the snobbery of those who eat it, sushi
today belongs to the masses. Approximately 30 million Americans
regularly eat sushi, including the Simpsons, the country’s favorite
animated family. And it isn’t just Americans who have developed a
passion for sushi. A taste for Japan’s signature delicacy has also
sprung up in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and China.
A
refined delicacy that is fast becoming a popular menu item around the
world, sushi says something important about how wealth, taste and the
market interact on an international scale. As Sasha Issenberg argues in
The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy,
sushi both reveals the "complex dynamics of globalization" and proves
what many critics regard as a singular impossibility, that "a virtuous
global commerce and food culture can exist."
Issenberg knows how
counter-intuitive his claim is: After all, we tend to associate sushi
with the hushed, ritualized elegance of Japanese culture, and we often
regard the sushi bar as a welcome escape from the hard economic bustle
of daily life. The immediate experience of eating sushi is, for many,
one of transcendent sensual calm, at once richly evocative and
profoundly removed from earthly things.
But for Issenberg,
that’s the point. In its striking beauty, sushi has the quality of art,
and often seems to come from nowhere to exist purely as an irresistibly
gorgeous, edible creation. Yet despite appearances, every piece of
sushi has a distinctly modern, highly sophisticated economic history –
and in its journey from the sea to the market to the restaurant, from
living fish to marketable good, it has much to tell us about how
balanced, healthy world markets can be created and maintained. As such,
Issenberg argues, "the new sushi economy has challenged the way we see
the globe."
A Jet-age Commodity
For Issenberg, the story
of the sushi economy is the story of tuna. Originally reviled in Japan
(so greasy it was only good for cat food), the bluefin was the
beneficiary of a post-World War II shift in the Japanese diet toward
heavier, fatty meats. The overwhelming popularity of the bluefin’s
buttery flesh meant that by the early 1970s, the Japanese had
overfished their waters and were on the lookout for new sources of
their favorite dish. The moment coincided with the rise of Japan
Airlines (JAL), which was doing a tidy export business but needed to
find something to fill its freight cabin on return flights. In an
inspiration that would change the culinary profile of the planet, a JAL
executive partnered with the fishermen of Prince Edward Island, Canada,
who caught plenty of bluefin, but who had no use for it. Devising a
means of gently freezing bluefin to preserve it during the long journey
back to Japan, JAL inaugurated the era of global sushi.
Issenberg
devotes considerable time to charting Japan’s internal sushi economy,
with special emphasis on Toyko’s Tsukiji market, where fish imported
from around the world are auctioned daily to bidders well versed in the
arcane science of evaluating meat they have not tasted. At Tsukiji, we
learn, a single bluefin regularly goes for $30,000 or more at auction;
once all but worthless, bluefin has become one of the world’s hottest
and most wholesome commodities. Detailing how Tokyo’s Narita
International Airport has become — paradoxically — Japan’s most
important fishing harbor, Issenberg explains how even in Japan, sushi
is a jet-age commodity. While sushi’s roots go back hundreds of years
to an era when fish was packed in rice to ferment and preserve it, the
nigiri and maki that signify sushi today are only as old as the
technological means of transporting highly perishable fish swiftly and
efficiently from one end of the world to the other.
Originally
devised to keep the Japanese in tuna, the transport system that evolved
around bluefin has helped sushi spread far beyond Japan. Issenberg maps
the rise of regional sushi cultures in California, Texas and middle
America (Oklahoma, it seems, is one of sushi’s newest hot spots). And
in a chapter that holds special resonance for big-city sushi lovers,
Issenberg follows world famous sushi chef Nobu from Japan to Peru to
the U.S. to the Bahamas and beyond, examining how he first reinvented
sushi in his own idiosyncratic image and then standardized his brand
via his growing chain of restaurants.
Working backward from
restaurants to suppliers, Issenberg studies the fishing economy of
Gloucester, Mass., where centuries-old fishing traditions have met with
modern management in the form of True World Foods, a distributor
founded by the Moonies that is now one of North America’s top suppliers
of fresh sushi-grade fish. He also takes us to Port Lincoln, Australia,
where innovative ranching enterprises have made local fishermen some of
the richest people down under.
Through detailed, highly
localized accounts of restaurants and chefs, fishermen and middlemen,
markets and appetites, Issenberg casts sushi as an enormously positive
example of globalization. An exceptionally unusual ethnic food that has
kept its integrity while spreading its appeal, sushi melds the
hunter-gatherer purity of long-line fishing; the sophistication of
state-of-the-art transport; the hands-on, humane exchange of the
auction; and the immense act of international trust undertaken by the
millions who are willing to eat raw fish without knowing its origins or
history. An index to a nation’s worldliness, sushi expresses not only
the sophistication of a country’s taste, but also an equally
sophisticated confidence in the procedural purity of an industry with
great potential for corruption and adulteration.
Sushi thus
offers a refreshing opportunity to rewrite the depressing story about
globalization to which we have become accustomed in recent years. This
story tends to see the expansion of global markets as coming at a steep
cost. As we grow increasingly global in our preferences, processes and
possessions, the story goes, we lose our ties to local variants of the
same; globalization tends to be equated with standardization and
diminishment, with a flattening out of vital cultural specificity and
an exploitative disregard for traditions. As Thomas Friedman, perhaps
our primary teller of this tale, has put it, globalization amounts to a
struggle for balance between the Lexus and the olive tree, between the
manufactured world of international commerce and traditional economies
grounded in nature, custom and place. Too often, the story goes, as
global markets expand, it is the ways, beliefs, languages, styles and
cuisines of particular locales that are lost. As the Lexus sells, the
olive tree dies.
Crab and Couscous, and Spam
Friedman
says he was eating sushi when the idea for The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(1999) came to him, so it’s only fitting that sushi would serve as the
proving ground for Issenberg’s attempt to offer a signal instance of
globalization that balances the competing claims of world-scale
commerce and cultural particularity. And, indeed, Issenberg is at his
most fascinating when he outlines how sushi is at once preserved and
reinvented in every new market it meets: Crab and avocado found their
way into rolls in California, because that’s what was available. In
Brazil, California rolls are made with mango rather than avocado, again
because that’s what’s available. In Singapore, one can find California
rolls with both avocado and mango — and one can also find curry rolls
and halal sushi bars. Hawaiians retain a World War II-era taste for
sushi made with Spam. In Marrakech, one can eat maki made with couscous.
Contradicting
the scare stories proffered by other recent chroniclers of global
foodways (think Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s
The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Issenberg serves up a singularly appealing
picture of how our almost insatiable globalized hunger for new
experiences, new things, new services — and, crucially, new foods –
might be able to co-exist with our increasingly urgent desire to
preserve local traditions and protect the environment. Combining a
hunter-gatherer purity with a sophisticated international market
organized around swift transit and state-of-the-art refrigeration,
wealthy consumers and artisan chefs who continually reinvent sushi
according to local tastes and ingredients, sushi seems to reconcile the
conflict between the Lexus and the olive tree. Sushi extends the
possibility that we might actually be able to have our globalization
and eat it, too.
As Issenberg tells it, sushi sounds too good to
be true — and maybe it is. Toward the end of the book, Issenberg
outlines how the growing global passion for sushi has led to massive
overfishing of bluefin. As the market for bluefin expands, the bluefin
population shrinks — a circumstance that has led to rising prices,
unenforceable quota systems and ruthless international piracy.
But
the depletion of bluefin has also provoked a remarkable redefinition of
delicacy that may prove Issenberg’s thesis after all. As quality
bluefin gets harder to find, Japanese sushi bars are looking for ways
to replicate the gorgeous look and feel of tuna, with its bright red
flesh and velvety texture — and they are turning to two unlikely
sources: horse meat and smoked venison. As strange and even
unappetizing as that may sound, it’s an innovation that is true to the
spirit of modern sushi, which is anchored in a fish that was once
regarded as inedible, and which makes a marketable virtue of local
culinary traditions grounded in convenience. Raw horse is a delicacy in
some parts of Japan. Known as basashi, it is served sashimi-style with
soy and ginger — and is even incorporated into ice cream. Perhaps the
next chapter in the world’s evolving sushi economy will include
expanding its culinary boundaries beyond the sea.
Knowledge@Wharton
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm;jsessionid=9a30bddb5ebc31221454?articleid=1791&CFID=33790030&CFTOKEN=92940134&jsessionid=9a30bddb5ebc31221454#
