On top of all these regulatory challenges, there is the rise of sushi in the past three decades and the new demands that this phenomenon has put on tuna stocks. Curiously, tuna sushi is a relatively new invention, even in Japan. As Trevor Corson, an East Asia scholar and author of
The Story of Sushi,
wrote me recently, the cultured palates of the Japanese aristocracy generally preferred delicate white-fleshed snappers and breams over heavy, red-fleshed tunas. “Many of the so-called ‘red’ fish were thought to be too pungent and smelly,” Corson wrote, “so in the days before refrigeration, discerning Japanese diners avoided them.” All this began to change in the nineteenth century, when an abundant catch of tuna one season prompted a Tokyo street-stand sushi chef to marinate a few pieces of tuna in soy sauce and serve it as “nigiri sushi.” The practice caught on. Generally, smaller, leaner yellowfin tuna were used for nigiri. Occasionally a big, fatty bluefin came to market, but as Corson pointed out, these big bluefin were nicknamed
shibi,
or “four days,” because chefs felt they had to bury them in the ground for four days to ferment and mellow the heavy, bloody taste of the meat. From the few stalls that served it in the Edo period, tuna caught on and by the 1930s was considered an integral part of a good sushi meal.
At first, Japanese tuna fishing was relatively contained. As a term of Japan’s surrender at the conclusion of World War II, Japanese vessels were prohibited from fishing beyond their territorial waters throughout the 1940s. But when the prohibition was lifted in 1952, things started to change. As Dr. Ziro Suzuki, an authority on Japanese offshore fisheries wrote to me, “In order to recover from the devastation of the war, Japanese fishermen needed more tunas to secure food for domestic demand and also to earn more money by exporting tunas to the canning industries in Europe and the U.S.” When the technology to deep-freeze tuna in the holds of fishing vessels was invented in the 1970s, though, more and more tuna could be served raw rather than canned. Suddenly fishermen could haul in tuna from the farthest reaches of the oceans, freeze them immediately, and keep their catch sushi-ready for as long as a year. Tuna sushi was suddenly exportable.
The evolution of the Western/Japanese sushi relationship had other twists. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Americans and Canadians ramped up the sportfishing of giant, thousand-pound Atlantic bluefin tuna, principally off Canada’s Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Most of these fish were caught, killed, and then discarded at the town dump, for, just like the Japanese, Americans considered bluefin too bloody to eat and had no interest in bringing home their catch. But the bluefin sport fishery developed at the same time as the Japanese export boom to North America. Cargo planes from Japan, stuffed with electronics and other consumer goods, would arrive in American airports only to fly back empty to Japan—a huge waste of fuel. It was only when several Japanese executives realized that they could buy bluefin for pennies on the pound from American sportfishermen that they began filling empty cargo holds with bluefin and flying them back to Japan. Within a few years, Japanese began esteeming bluefin above all other tuna, and this fetishization boomeranged back to the West, which soon developed its own bluefin appetite.
The West’s embrace of the Japanese sushi tradition had another multiplier effect: it brought people who had previously disliked fish into the fish-eating fold. I saw this immediate effect within my own family when my brother moved to Los Angeles to become a screen-writer. “You know how I’ve always been about cooked fish,” he wrote me when I asked him about his newfound sushi habit. “I couldn’t stand the smell or the taste or the texture. The few times I had to eat fish were usually at dinner parties. In those cases, I would breathe through my mouth so I couldn’t smell it and swallow small pieces whole so I wouldn’t have to taste it.
“Okay, cut to 1992,” my brother, the writer of horror films like
Halloween H20
and the Stephen King adaptation
1408,
continued. “I’d just moved to Los Angeles. After a lot of peer pressure, I finally agreed to go to our local sushi restaurant to try some. I ordered a regular tuna roll, thinking I would do my hold-my-breath-and-swallow-it-whole thing. But when it arrived, I immediately noticed something different—it didn’t smell ‘fishy.’ I dipped a piece in soy sauce mixed with a little wasabi, put the damn thing in my mouth, and chewed. Man, it was like that great moment in the film
Ratatouille,
where the evil food critic tries the eponymous dish and is suddenly transfigured. The raw tuna tasted nothing like cooked fish. Pun intended, I was hooked.”
What my brother tasted was a biochemical phenomenon that can be experienced with many high-speed, fatty fish but which is particularly true of tuna. Hard-swimming fish like tuna use large amounts of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to store and expend energy. After death ATP is converted to inosine monophosphate (IMP), a chemical associated with the “fifth” flavor Japanese call umami, or “tastiness.” It is a flavor that even non-fish eaters find pleasant on the tongue. When cooked, however, IMP breaks down and combines with other chemicals present in fish flesh and produces flavors that people like my brother find unpalatable. In addition, the odors that might be emitted by not-so-fresh fish are neutralized in Japanese sushi techniques by soy, ginger, and wasabi.
The global rise of sushi combined with the international failure to formulate a functional multination fishing agreement around tuna has led to progressive declines in many tuna stocks, the worst of which has been the decline of the two intermingling stocks of Atlantic bluefin tuna: the Western stock, which spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern stock, which breeds in the Mediterranean. Atlantic bluefin are the biggest and slowest-growing of the tunas; the Western stock can take more than seven years to reach sexual maturity and considerably longer to become “giants”—that is, the five-hundred-plus-pound spawners that many biologists feel are the key reproductive engines of bluefin populations. Since it is the giant spawners that are the primary targets of exploitation, their numbers have crashed. Fishermen always appreciated giant bluefin as animals—as fighters on the line or as evaders of harpoons. But the rapid growth in giant bluefin price, from pennies to hundreds of dollars a pound, created a different kind of appreciation. Today the passion to save bluefin is as strong as the one to kill them, and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman.
“I love these fish,” a commercial bluefin-tuna harpooner told the reporter John Seabrook in a 1994 issue of
Harper’s Magazine.
“But I love to catch them. God, I love to catch them. And I know you need some kind of catch limits because I’d catch all of them if I could.” As bluefin get more and more valuable on the marketplace (prices for a single fish have topped $150,000) the commercial fishermen who pursue them get more and more twisted in their behavior—a bit like Tolkien’s Gollum pursuing the ring. They are endlessly attractive to fishermen when present but can leave fishermen holding massive bills for fuel, bait, and gear when they vanish. It sometimes seems as if a Gandalf of fisheries management is needed to work up an incantation that would save the fisherman from the destructive relationship he has with the great fish, the one that tempts him to destroy the very profession that would sustain him.
The bluefin conservation advocates, often former tuna fishermen who have been able to pull themselves away from the lure of tuna’s silver-ingot bodies and marbled-sirloin flesh, have tried all manner of spells to get those who eat tuna or those officials who legislate over them to somehow sit up and take similar notice—to abstain from eating them or to pass enforceable regulation for the sake of their preciousness. It is this often-futile battle that is the most telling part of the tuna fishery today. It is the battle with ourselves. A battle between the altruism toward other species that we know we can muster and the primitive greed that lies beneath our relationship with the creatures of the sea.
And yet it is a battle that has been fought and won before, against high odds. Looking back over the history of the ocean, we can see that there is one order of sea creatures bigger than tuna that has earned our empathy and, more important, our protective resolve, rising up from the background of marine life to become a superstar of conservation, on a par with the tiger and the elephant. It is to this example we must look if we are to fix our tuna problem once and for all.
W
hale Carpaccio—130 Kroners.” Thus read the lead appetizer on the menu before me in an upscale Norwegian restaurant where I was dining on a recent winter evening. Eight slices of whale arranged raw on a plate for the reasonable price of about twenty U.S. dollars. I have to admit that the prospect of ordering it was intriguing. I had never been to a country that still practiced whaling, and I had certainly never seen whale on a menu. What would whale taste like? I wondered. Would it be fatty and chewy like beef, or would it have the loose, flaky texture of fish that don’t need dense muscles to resist the pull of gravity? Would it be served like prosciutto, with a thin slice of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese? Or, since carpaccio is an Italian dish and Italians avoid mixing cheese and seafood, would it be more appropriate merely to drizzle olive oil over the whale’s buttery sheen?
These were the thoughts that made my mouth water as the waitress approached my table. But when she took the pen from behind her ear and asked me in blunt Nordic style if I’d like to “try the whale,” all at once my twenty-first-century foodie curiosity wilted. “No,” I said, “I’ll have the mussels.”
I would like to be able to say that I did not “try the whale” because of some superior moral quality I possessed. But which animals we think of as food and which we think of as living creatures is highly contextual. My conception that a whale was somehow too good to eat comes from a historical process that predates me by nearly two centuries, a process that has yet to happen with fish.
Up until 1756, when the French zoologist Jacques Brisson published
Le Regne Animal Divisé en IX Classes
(
The Nine Classes of the Animal Kingdom
), whales were thought of by both the scientific and the lay communities as just very big fish. It was only when the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, in the tenth edition of his
Systema Naturae,
confirmed Brisson’s definition of whales as nonfish that a certain ennoblement of those animals started to occur. When Linnaeus went a step further and classified whales as mammals, that rankled Brisson, who suspected Linnaeus of overstepping the realms of scientific acceptability and trying to disguise his plagiarism of Brisson’s findings in an outlandish hypothesis. But Linnaeus was steadfast in his beliefs, asserting that whales “by good right and just title according to the law of nature” deserved to be classed with mammals
.
Mammalian or not, the fact that “cetaceans,” as the group would later be named, were not fish was well established within the scientific community by the end of the eighteenth century. By the new century’s turn, the idea that they were fish would start to sound downright preposterous to any self-respecting scientist. “This order of animals,” the English zoologist John Hunter wrote in the early 1800s, “has nothing peculiar to fish except living in the same element.” Yet even with Linnaeus’s and other major scientists’ imprimatur, it took many decades for the general public to accept the fact that whales were different and somehow special. Nowhere was this more evident than in the 1818 New York trial of
Maurice v. Judd.
Brilliantly reexamined by D. Graham Burnett in his 2007 book
Trying Leviathan,
the
Maurice
affair exposed the broad rift that existed and still exists between the measured findings of scientists and the “common sense” of the everyday consumer. By all rights the facts of the case should have buried it forever within the mountains of records in the New York legal system. The suit came about because of a new development in seafood regulation. Early in the nineteenth century, the state legislature of New York began requiring that all fish oil be inspected in order to allow better grading and to reduce the tendency of oil merchants to disguise one type of fish oil as another. In the case of
Maurice v. Judd,
Maurice (an inspector) had fined Samuel Judd (a candle maker) seventy-five dollars for buying three barrels of fish oil that had not been inspected. Judd refused to pay the fine, insisting that he had bought not “fish oil” but rather “whale oil” and that furthermore whales were not fish.
This somewhat trivial dispute might have been banged away by the thud of a less patient judge’s gavel, but instead the trial became a media circus, in part because of a colorful array of witnesses that included a whaler by the name of Preserved Fish, but mostly because of the participation of Samuel Mitchill, an Enlightenment naturalist and New York City’s most famous scientist. For two days Mitchill sparred with William Sampson, a respected and often wily prosecutor, trying to establish the great differences between whales and fish: That whales were warm-blooded. That they breathed air. That they lacked scales. And, in a moment that shocked the standing-room-only crowd, Mitchill declared that “a whale is no more a fish than a man.”
But in spite of Mitchill’s depth of knowledge and his standing in New York society, his careful explanations ended up confusing and even enraging the trial’s jury. After a short deliberation, the jury returned a verdict that slapped down a hundred years of careful scientific investigations. A whale, the jury foreman announced to the assembled crowd of journalists, gossipmongers, and wharf dwellers,
was
in fact a fish.
The press taunted Mitchill for days afterward. “Pray sir, how goes it with whale oil now?” wrote New York’s
Evening Post
. “Is it oil of fish, or of flesh, or of
red herring
?”