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Fish TalesTalking sushi with Trevor Corson and Sasha Issenberg.

By Sara Dickerman
Posted Friday, July 6, 2007, at 2:20 PM ET
Sushi. Click image to expand.

Among the most expensive meals in America is the perfectly crafted sushi at Manhattan's Masa. But sushi is also one of the country's most workaday meals—found in corporate cafeterias and delis alike. Sushi has saturated nearly every level of our food economy: How did this ostensibly Japanese food come to be so dominant? This season, two serious-minded books examine how sushi got to be one of our reflexive dining options, and how our taste for rice and fish affects our oceans.

In The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, Sasha Issenberg, a Philadelphia-based writer (who has written for Slate), focuses on how sushi as we know it—and in particular, the coveted, fatty flesh of the bluefin tuna—is the product of a very sophisticated (and sometimes clandestine) global economy. In The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, From Samurai to Supermarket, Trevor Corson, who dug deep into crustacean sex life in The Secret Life of Lobsters, tells the story of sushi from a very different point of view. He follows along with a session of the California Sushi Academy, which is trying to supply this country's untrammeled demands for sushi chefs. Along the way he profiles the students and teachers, as well as the individual fish that top our nigiri. The books are complementary rather than redundant, although both circle back to themes of sushi as a multicultural phenomenon, rather than a pure Japanese tradition. We gathered them together for an interview on sushi: its history, its cultural status, its environmental impact, and its future.

Slate: Sushi obviously developed long before refrigeration. Can you talk a little bit about its origins?

Issenberg: Sushi started as a method of using rice to ferment the fish—it was a preservation tool. It was not until the 19th century that you get what the Japanese call "fast sushi," which is basically sushi as we know it—nigiri made à la minute, assembled and eaten in basically the same motion. Major technological and business revolutions in the 20th century allowed us to create cold-storage supply chains across continents, as well as use jet travel to move this food around the world fast enough to eat it raw on another continent. In that sense, sushi is now operating diametrically opposed to where it started.

Corson: Pickling is the really great example that has carried through from the origins of early sushi to today. Fish actually needs to age a little bit to develop flavor, so the traditional technique that sushi chefs used when it was a street food before the age of refrigeration was pickling. In those days, sushi places were often called tsuke-ba, which means "pickling place," because they used so much salt and vinegar in preparation of the fish. They were pickling the fish to prevent it from going bad.

We've come to think that the freshest tuna is the ultimate sushi experience, but if you go back and order a piece of mackerel sushi that's pickled, that's the technique that originally defined sushi. I think it's fascinating that we assume sushi's all about the fresh, raw fish, but there are die-hard sushi aficionados in Japan who don't consider it sushi unless the chef has done something to his seafood ingredients, whether it's a slight parboil or pickling.

Slate: How much of the sushi we get today has been frozen?

Issenberg: There are food-handling laws that vary state by state. It depends where you're eating and what time of year and what you're paying for it. But if you're eating American-style fast food sushi—sushi at the mall food court—it's overwhelmingly frozen. You can eat very good bluefin tuna that's been frozen in these big nitrogen-driven freezers that go down to -70 degrees. They stop all molecular activity and decay in a fish.

Corson: Salmon is a great example of a case where we think, "Good sushi's always perfectly fresh," but the fact is that salmon is almost never used for sushi in Japan because it's a fish that spends a good amount of time in freshwater, which makes it very susceptible to parasites and worms. So all of the salmon sushi we're eating better have been frozen at a very cold temperature for a good amount of time.

Slate: Sasha, could you describe a little what an apprenticeship might be like for a sushi chef in Japan?

Issenberg: The traditional apprenticeship of the chef can take up to 10 years from the moment a teenage kid enters the door of a sushi bar to when he's thought to be ready to be a head chef at his own restaurant. It usually requires several years before they even go close to touching or cutting fish. They start by going down to the market with the master and helping him carry his bags back. Then there are errands, cleaning up around the restaurant. Eventually, there's the making of rice, and eventually the prepping of fish. It's a long while before somebody's putting rice and fish together. This serves historically not only to train chefs but also to regulate the labor market in Japan. Now, with the high demand for sushi chefs outside of Japan, very few chefs have gone through that ladder.

Slate: Trevor, what made you decide to frame your book around the California Sushi Academy, an American cooking school that definitely challenged the apprenticeship model?

Corson: I was basically looking for an American story about sushi. The reason that Toshi Sugiura started the school is that he had become kind of a stickler for hygiene, healthfulness, and these safety issues with sushi. He saw the demand for sushi spreading so rapidly in the U.S. that there was no way that the traditional apprenticeships were going to satisfy the demands for chefs. He figured we at least needed a way to create a quick basic foundation for people. He's not expecting that they'll become expert sushi chefs after the three-month training at the school, but it will give them the basic knowledge.

Slate: Do you think that people who are enrolling at the school understand that they're not going to be full-fledged chefs?

Corson: I don't know. There's an incredible range of people that come into the school. Sushi now has completely broken out of its traditional mode, and there's a whole range of different forms and manifestations. That's both perilous and fascinating.

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Sara Dickerman has written about food for the New York Times Magazine, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, and Seattle magazine.
Photograph of sushi by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images.
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