Extinction by Sushi

Take a good look at the photo above to get a better appreciation for the rest of the post. It's picture I took just prior to the tuna (I think bluefin) auction that is held almost every morning in the fish market in Tokyo, Tsukiji. Also, the photo only captures a fraction of the auction floor.

Now on to our regularly scheduled program already in progress...

I've been reading a fascinating book called "The Sushi Economy" that describes in detail how the zeal for sushi in its current form evolved, in large part due to one man who worked for Japan Airlines in the early 1970s.

Now the fish that started it all, bluefin tuna, may be threatened to the point of extinction by the industry that it launched.

From Time magazine...

If environmentalists and marine scientists are right, the world's remaining stocks of bluefin tuna, 90% of which are in the Mediterranean, could be on the verge of extinction. Says Alain Fonteneau, a marine biologist for France's government-run Institute for Development Research in Montpellier: "If we do nothing, in five years we will fish the last bluefin tuna."

The surge in bluefin tuna fishing over the past decade has been driven by the proliferation of sushi restaurants across the world. The bluefin industry, once the province of rustic local fishing fleets in Mediterranean, was last year worth about $1.6 billion. Today, tuna fleets use high-tech spotter planes buzzing over the Med during the summertime tuna-spawning season, in search of shoals that have escaped the trappers.

The industry's major players are massive multinational corporations such as Mitsubishi, the world's biggest tuna trader. Some of the larger companies have created state-of-the-art tuna ranches in the Med's deep waters, where bluefin tuna swim into giant nets and are fattened over a period of months before being hauled out and processed in floating factories before being exported.

Click here to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium's (MBA) guide to sustainable sushi and here to get a handy pocket guide to sustainable sushi from MBA.

Please do your part to save an endangered species and Just Say No to Bluefin Tuna.