Tuna cravings

“Sushi, fuck yeah” — the ubiquity of sushi hits me in the face as I listen to the theme song of the parody movie “Team America.” The plot goes like this: America has run out of ideas to win the war on terror, and they are in desperate need for help. They enlist the best actor they can find in Hollywood, and tell him to infiltrate terrorist cells by way of his acting skills. The theme song — America, fuck yeah — is a long list of all the Middle East will experience once it is dominated by America. High notes include are “liberty, fuck yeah,” “porn, fuck yeah,” and “Wal-Mart, fuck yeah.” Interestingly enough, only two foods are mentioned: one is mayonnaise, and the other is sushi.

Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable to think of sushi as a cultural export of the United States to the Middle East. Sushi was the food of the enemy. Japan’s image in the United States after WWII was that of a people who were crazy about their emperor, and were also crazy enough to fly a kamikaze mission or commit harakiri.

Fifty years ago it would have also been unthinkable to predict how our appetite for tuna would change. Tuna was considered, both in Japan and the United States, cat food. Fishermen thought of it as a nuisance and would often throw it back into the sea if they caught one by accident. All of this has changed. Nowadays tuna populations are severely overfished, and thousands of people make a living supplying fresh, sashimi-grade tuna to restaurants across the world (not to mention the canning business).

Until I came to Japan, I had never seen a whole tuna. My closest contact had been a respectable hunk of meat at a sushi restaurant in Vancouver, or the countless cans I’ve bought over the years, but neither of them begins to reveal what a tuna looks like. It wasn’t until I found myself at 6 am at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market that I first saw fisherman slice the tunas with meter-long knives or with a precision chainsaw. It wasn’t until I was walking in the old district of Asakusa during a festival and found a store that bought a whole tuna and was selling every bit of it, that I came to realize the sheer magnitude of the fish.

I don’t think of tunas as fish anymore; I think it’s better to think of them as ocean buffalos…wild, indomitable, and massive! And our hunger for them continues to increase.

Unfortunately for tunas, they are caught in a legal limbo of our making. For most of humanity, the oceans have been regulated by the concept of mare liberum. This means that the ocean, and its resources, belong to nobody. However, the moment one of us catches something, it becomes our private property. Of course this is a recipe for ecological disaster because we all know that if we don’t catch something now, somebody else will, and there might be nothing left later.

Over time there have been numerous attempts to reign in our appetite for the oceans, but one of the most important piece of legislation was the introduction of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in the 1970s. This law gives countries the rights to regulate fishing for 200 miles outside their coast. Even though EEZs cover only 35 percent of the oceans, most seafood lives close to the coast, and 90 percent of all marine resources came to be controlled by governments.

And here comes the catch — there’s a few migratory species that do not respect our imaginary boundaries for the oceans, and, surprise surprise, they tend to be the species that are quite threatened. Tunas, whales and turtles, for example, make a mockery of our system and move freely from one EEZ to the next, and also swim in areas where no state has control over the waters. Regulating the catch for these animals is a logistical nightmare, and there are plenty of opportunities for unscrupulous fishers to catch more than they should.

As I posed for a picture by the tuna’s head, 90 percent of my thoughts were images of sashimi and succulent toro. But a small part of me feels guilty about fueling an industry that so far shows no intention of slowing down their tuna catches.

I’m waiting for the industry to start certifying a sustainable catch so I can freely enjoy my sashimi. Other parts of the seafood industry have already started regulating themselves and bringing external agencies to make sure that they are being responsible (the main initiative is the Marine Stewardship Council, which is a colaboration that started with the WWF and Unilever), I have nothing against eating tuna; in fact, I’ll be the first to pick up my chopsticks, but it would be nice to see an effort to manage the catch before we get to the point of the whaling industry.