Global fish: Bluefin tuna and the frontiers of sushi
A sensory preamble
- Miya’s Sushi (68 Howe Street)
- “Jirō Dreams of Sushi” (by David Gelb, 2011)
I. Food, culture, and anthropology: A sampler of titles/topics
- Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964)
- Richard Shweder, Why do Men Barbeque? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (2003)
- Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985)
- Anne Allison, “Japanese Mothers and obentō: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus”
II. Sushi and our three theses on globalization
- Multiple interconnectivity
- Global-local recursivity
- Standardizing and relativizing differences
III. Sushi as system
resource extraction (production) –> marketing (exchange) –> cuisine (consumption)
A. The global scale of resource extraction (minerals, timber, crops, oil à fish)
B. Governance
- Stateless, migratory, and undocumented fish
- Local technologies and territories (gamut from hundreds-year-old practices to industrial fishing)
- International bodies (blue fin, whaling, etc.) + NGO activities (Greenpeace)
C. Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market: Sites, lines and nodes of global flows
- Location
- Layout
- Organization
- Current changes (location, supply chain, personnel)
D. Sushi as cuisine
IV. Cuisine as a total food system
- Standards and stipulations of ingredients, preparation, presentation, and consumption
- How cuisine marks ethnicity, regionalism, nationality, gender, and class
V. When cuisine goes global
- Authenticity
- Connoisseurship (Jirō vs. Oishinbo gurume manga)
- Branding (konbini onigiri, “sushi restaurant”)
- Playful permutations, from kitsch to cool (Rainbow Roll Sushi in Tokyo)
- Political food (health, labor, and environment)
VI. Miya’s Sushi: Beyond the global/local binary
Food for thought, thought for food | Bun Lai’s philosophy [Source: http://miyassushi.com/about/]
In my cuisine, I use the technique of sushi as a medium to explore what it is to be human. I see our work at Miya’s Sushi as the logical progression of sushi as it inevitably evolves into food that is cross-cultural, and more expressive of a human race that is educated enough to both respect each other’s differences, and to appreciate that, in spite of those differences we are, in the end, family. In every recipe of mine, cultures harmonize in ways that the people of the world have not yet figured out how to accomplish.
There is no religion where food is not used as an expression of the holy. Food brings people together. Food is a way to communicate that transcends language. Food helps us aspire to be more. Food must be idealistic and romantic. And that is why man cannot live on rice alone.
We are aware that the restaurant industry has a very harmful impact on the environment; in particular, the traditional cuisine of sushi is destroying our oceans. Therefore, we try to maintain a restaurant in as ecologically responsible manner as possible. We do our best to not use ingredients that are either overfished or that in their production have a negative impact on the environment. As a result, half of our vast menu is vegetable-centered; the other half does not utilize traditional sushi ingredients such as Toro, Bluefin Tuna, Big Eye Tuna, certain Yellowfin, Unagi, Red Snapper, Maine Sea Urchin, Octopus, and so on. Instead, we’ve created dishes that include unconventional sushi ingredients such as Catfish, which, unlike the farming of many farmed fish, are grown in confined ponds that make it virtually impossible to cross-contaminate other species or destroy the aquatic ecosystem around them.
Miya’s Sushi appeals to a growing population of sushi lovers who care enough about our planet to change the way they eat; they realize that consumerism, along with our zeal for exotic seafood, is sucking the breath out of our oceans. Together with our customers, we strive to eat in such a way that is nourishing for our bodies, our planet, and our souls.
But is Miya’s Sushi sushi?