Appetite for Destruction: Eating Bluefin Tuna Into Extinction

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Respect for the American chef..ο»Ώ

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 2 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/suqeak πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ May 06 2017 πŸ—«︎ replies

Don't be scared by Munchies, it's a pretty good documentary, same as their other documentaries

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 4 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/thtoast πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ May 05 2017 πŸ—«︎ replies
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I love sushi, it's one of my favorite foods. But I truly believe that if you are serving bluefin, that you're contributing to the extinction of a species. Well, that's very misleading. I don't think everybody, we have inside information. At the heart of our love for sushi is bluefin tuna. The most loved by sushi fans, the most expensive at market. The diamond of the sea. But the global economy has made it more valuable than other. Prices can rise and fall by tens of thousands of dollars a day. And it can lose more value more quickly than any other product on Earth. But now, those who care about the fish are starting to worry that our ever-growing appetites may have put it at risk. A generation-long gold rush for this new prize of the seas may be leading to its own extinction. I'm Sasah Issenberg, a journalist and author of the book, The Sushi Economy, Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. I started exploring this business about a decade ago. And it's been a tremendous change in the global economy. Today, sushi is a multi-billion dollar international business, and bluefin tuna is the most prized. Single fish can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. I wanted to go back out and see what the sushi world was like now, and what that meant for the fate of the Pacific bluefin tuna. Before the 1960s, Japanese didn't want to eat oily fatty fish. No one anywhere wanted bluefin tuna. At best, they paid pennies a pound to see it ground up as cat food. But eventually, the Japanese, looking at Americans devouring their bloody red steaks, wanted oily meat of their own. And started asking for bluefin tuna at the sushi bar. Japan catches the majority of the Pacific bluefin tuna. In fact, Japan consumes 90% of the world's supply of Pacific bluefin tuna. Followed by Mexico, the United States, South Korea and China, and illegal fishing is rampant. Data compiled over the last 60 years on tuna biology and annual catches has led some scientists to conclude that over 96% of the world's original stock of Pacific bluefin tuna are now gone. Some now estimate that fewer than 40,000 adult Pacific bluefin remain in the wild. Concern over the dwindling numbers of Pacific bluefin tuna has long been overshadowed by the attention paid to the Atlantic and southern bluefin, two other types of tuna already treated as endangered species. Scientific authorities are now concerned about the precarious situation of the Pacific bluefin tuna, whose listing they recently changed from of least concern to vulnerable to extinction. This is a crisis that's affecting not only the US and Japan, but other players in that sushi business around the world. And I think there is a lot more interests now among people in government, industry and media and consumers about the need to do something serious about it. Pacific bluefin migrate from the waters around Japan, where breeding grounds are located, to the Pacific coast off North America. To understand the globalized nature of the sushi business, I'm starting here in Los Angeles. And we'll follow a tuna back across the Pacific to its other home, Japan. I've come to Hollywood to meet chef Michael at his restaurant Providence. Michael's managed to earn two Michelin stars while serving only what he calls sustainable seafood. That means one thing you won't find on his menu here, bluefin tuna. So what does sustainable seafood mean to you? A sustainable fish is one that's been harvested within quota. It's harvested in light of research and science which that says that the biomass is healthy and can support a certain level of harvest. And is there a bluefin tuna that you consider sustainable? No. Absolutely not. I think that's the one fish that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that's really thinking about the matter that would tell you that you can feel good about serving it. I serve fish for a living, as do many other chefs. But it's important to me that the fish that we serve are sustainable. So did you replace bluefin on your menu with something else? Yeah, we use bigeye. We also use yellowfin. So these are other red tunas. These are other red-fleshed tunas. Frankly anywhere you would use bluefin, you could use a bigeye or a yellowfin. So what was it that prompted you nine years ago to make the decision to stop selling bluefin? The research kept coming back and it always said exactly the same thing. That it's a species that is in peril both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. Let's say you have 100 friends on Facebook today and then let's imagine that tomorrow you wake up and you're down to four. And those other 96 are gone from the picture. Never to be seen again. That's what the, exactly what the bluefin is in right now. 4% of it's historic bio-mass is what exist in the Pacific today. I truly believe that if you are serving bluefin then you're contributing to the extinction of a species. I mean, I would love to see that there could be a sustainable and guilt free harvest of bluefin at some point. I mean bluefin are international fish. So bluefin they span the globe. It's very difficult to legislate the harvest of a fish that travels the way bluefin do. There's so many species in this world, obviously, that are threatened. But I feel like it's difficult, I think, to form a connection with a fish. That's the problem. That is the real problem. People don't care enough. People are so passionate about so many other things but when it comes to something like You know, saving the giant bluefin, it's difficult to raise people's ire. In light of all of the science, in light of everything that's been said, in light of all the information that's out there. And it's such a simple thing to save. None of us in the United States are going to starve because we don't eat bluefin on a daily or weekly basis. No one. Question is how do you develop passion, enough passion in people to just sit down in a sushi bar and say a few simple words, which is I don't eat bluefin, you know? You can take bluefin tuna off your menu if you're an American or French restaurant. What happens if you're a sushi bar? I'm gonna go to one of the hundreds here in LA. Talk to a chef about what his choices are. Across town at Hamasaku, one of hundreds of sushi bars in the greater LA area. There's rarely talk about the environmental consequences of loving bluefin. But the chef has his own sort of interesting story, he's from Japan but he's worked in Jamaica making sushi. And so he's very much interested in sort of interpreting sushi for the time and place in which he's serving it. So how long have you been a sushi chef? I almost doing 40 years now. Oh wow. Well why don't you show me what's good today? Yeah, absolutely. You have bluefin tuna. >From Spain. Okay. Look, right here. Is that a very fatty piece And was it wild or ranched? Do you know? I'd say this is ranched. Ranch Ranching and farming were both developed as a way to take some of the pressure off of wild stocks. There are various methods of harvesting Pacific bluefin tuna, and each of them comes with their own trade offs in terms of sustainability. When you ranch, you're taking small fish, which means they were removed from the water before they can reproduce. Removing them through nets into pens, where they can be fattened in captivity. But in doing so, you're obliterating the juvenile stocks who would otherwise grow large and breed themselves. Farming takes the whole lifecycle and does it in captivity, alleviates all of the pressure off of wild stocks and doesn't touch juveniles. But growing an adult bluefin tuna from birth in captivity is an incredibly expensive enterprise. Bluefin tuna metabolize 15 times their body weight. Which means that for every pound of tuna that you grow out in captivity, you're having to put 15 pounds of wild feed. That means mackerel, cultured squid, in the pen for it. There's obviously not any easy solution to bringing this rare predator to our plates. It's difficult to get wild fish. Yeah. But, you know, they don't have any kind of crazy fat. It used to be Japanese. It was too fatty, right? Yeah too fatty and too meaty. And do you find customers that are concerned about ordering bluefin now because of the environment? Still people do like it. People do order it. What do you say to customers who tell you that they have a problem with bluefin? I mean, just you don't need to eat. I mean, you don't want to eat, don't eat that thing. That's the right way. I don't want to push customer to, Have to eat. Do they fight with you about that or? Some customer, they like fight. Yeah. But I don't say fight to them. Exactly, you don't want to eat, just don't eat. Well, compi. When you sit down at a sushi bar and you order a piece of fish, all you're doing is interacting with the chef but there's this whole world behind them. It's passing through six, eight, ten different hands, across continents, money's moving, values are changing, expectations are changing, and so I wanted to go explore what's happening behind the sushi bar. How is that fish coming to me, and what does it mean for the world? A big part of eating sustainable seafood is knowing where it comes from. So I'm going to a fish distributor to find out for myself. Rex Ito is a marine biologist who 25 years ago, got into the business of dealing tuna and he runs Prime Time Seafood, a distributorship right next to LAX airport in Los Angeles. So the major ports of entry in the U.S. for fresh fish in general is L.A., Miami, New York and then kind of distributes from there. And so the fish we see today will have come in to LAX on a plane, and you all just picked it up and? Yeah. There's a joke that the biggest fishing harbor now is the international airport because the fish are no longer coming in just by boat but by air. We still have this romantic idea that when you want the freshest fish, you go find the place that's closest to the water but it's probably actually in unsexy places like Rex Ito's warehouse that are the closest in place that the fish are landing in the United States. We pick it up at the airport. We grade the fish. We take samples of the fish and depending on the quality of the fish, we'll determine the price and the market it's gonna go to and we send out to a different country to a different customers. Tuna is a very special fish. It's one of the few fish that's warm blooded. So what that means is the internal temperature of the tuna is about, is ten degrees centigrade higher than the ambient water temperature. So that's why that fish can be in cold water and have bursts of speed and keeps them metabolically active, right? And how fast do they swim? I think 50 miles an hour. They can get up to 50 miles an hour. It's incredible. It's a beautiful animal. Where does the strength come from in a fish like that to go 50 miles an hour? Well, the whole body is muscle. You can tell the shape of the fish is like a torpedo. It's really a magnificent fish. So this is an example of a burned fish, which means the meat got heated up, it's not that sweet taste. Taste that and then taste that. Well, definitely more acidic. Yeah. That's exactly what a sushi chef can taste. These are farmed bluefin from Mexico. Okay. So, when you say farmed, what does that mean? More accurately, it's ranched. Okay. Farm would be from egg to harvest. These fish are caught wild, kept in. How large are they when they are caught wild? It depends. It can be anywhere from 15 kilos up to 100 kilos. So there is oil fat in all parts of this fish. Chef's are really looking for, is this belly section, the. And how much more would a piece of that sell for at a sushi bar, than that? Several times? Maybe as much as triple. Okay, so as a marine biologist, what are you afraid of in the long term about tuna? If we follow science and maybe not politics, we could easily manage the tuna fisheries in the world. You mean setting regulations and enforcing them? Yeah, correct. So the latest you know, the sky is falling kind of information is that 90% of the bluefin of the Pacific are gone, or they can't seem to find them. Well, that's very misleading but curiously, the biomass and the production and capture of bluefin, in the Pacific, has remained constant for 50 years. So, that's where I have an issue between science and politics. I think you can take any data and construe it any way that you want to the cause that you're purporting but I think what I'm saying now, let the studies happen. I don't have a problem with that. I think we do need to conserve. I don't feel guilty about eating bluefin or ordering bluefin in a restaurant but we have inside information. It's very difficult to say we're sustainable. Does that word mean anything to you? I think nothing is truly sustainable, right. I think my best description would be is it's caught in a responsible way. And that affects the types of fish that are available to people in the U.S.? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. As an importer to the U.S., one of the first things we check is what's the price in Japan? What's going on in Japan? If the prices are low in Japan, we're going to get higher quality fish from the Asian suppliers. It's clear from talking to him that what really drives the market around the world is what takes place in Japan. Just as Pacific bluefin migrate from the California coasts to the waters off Japan, I'm following their trail to find out what I can learn on the other side of the ocean. I'm heading to the largest fish market in the world in the epicenter of the global seafood industry. We're here at Tsukiji Market in downtown Tokyo. This is known as Tokyo's pantry because it's where many of the capital's restaurants and markets get their ingredients. It's also one of the largest and most dynamic seafood markets in the world. We're here to take a look at the tuna auctions, where expectations and prices for bluefin are set that affect everything across the world. Everyday, fish are coming in from all over the world and the number and quality of them varies dramatically. Lay them out in big, cold warehouse and starting before dawn every morning, some of the hundreds of seafood dealers who are based in the Tsukiji Market come and begin inspecting fish and deciding which ones that they want to bid on. The big auction houses that sell tuna to the Tsukiji Market are known generically as the the seafood companies and their buyers at the auctions are known as it means intermediate wholesalers. So how does that work, that the prices here are able to affect prices around Japan and other parts of the world? Tsukiji is the number one tuna market in Japan. Because Tsukiji is the center of the seafood market in Japan. Local markets can use Tsukiji prices as an index to judge the fair value of their products. How much of the business is tuna? Is magaro? In terms of money, 25%. And what are the advantages for the fish to physically move through the market? At Tuskiji we have about 250 tuna buyers. And since they all inspect the tuna, it ensures you'll get a fair price. So how many tuna did your company sell today? Today Tsukiji is storing 40 tons (88,000 lbs) of fresh bluefin tuna. And 90 tons (198,000 lbs) of frozen bluefin. Eventually all of these tuna will sell out from the 5 wholesale companies. I think we move 80 billion to 100 billion yen per year. I think we move 80 billion to 100 billion yen per year. Oh, this is not our profit. ...Well, we can't tell you our profit. In 2012, at the prestigious New Year's auction at Tsukiji, a single tuna sold for $1.76 million. Even last year, a bluefin went for $70,000. While these prices don't reflect the fair market value of a tuna, they do reflect the cultural prominence of tuna in Japanese life. This is big business. This is the center of a massive global marketplace, the same way that the New York Stock Exchange is. The difference though? The tuna industry hasn't been changed by the development of new financial instruments.Not just anybody can bid on a tuna at Tsukiji Market. One of the dealers who's based there needs a license. And it's a little blue chip that they usually put on their hat or on their shirt. And they come in and they start inspecting the fish. Often it's less than an hour to go through hundreds of fish. And so there's this really rapid process of sizing up a fish. Looking at it's shape, looking at the skin to get a sense of it's firmness, it's texture. The tail section will be cut off so you get a, a look at that you get a sense of the oil content. You can see how the fat's marbled there, you can see how evenly the fat's distributed through different parts of the fish, through each of its lobes. Auction houses will, will number their fish with, with red paint on its belly. This is basically a bar code for the auctions. Fish don't have names, all they have is a yellow piece of paper on them that'll say that the port or the country at which it was landed, whether it was farmed, ranched, wild. Everything beyond that, assessing its value is up to individual buyers before they bid on it. Soon as the bell rings to start the auctions, to go figure out which of the different fish they wanna bid on. And from then on it's a Japanese market slang, calling out numbers. Incredibly complicated set of hand signals. Do you see a change in the demand internationally, in the United States or other countries that are competing for the same supply of fish? Yes, the demand for tuna is growing rapidly but not only in Japan. Because of the global boom in sushi, the demand for bluefin has increased worldwide. As soon as the auction individual tuna is concluded, the auction house had sold it will mark the buyer and it's up to them to cart it off back to their stall through this sort of maze of the market. And, often quickly with the tuna, they want to get it cut up to see what's inside. And then they're seeing all the different cuts of tuna, which they will price differently, because an individual sushi bar isn't going to go through more than 20 or 30 pounds of it in a day. These are the people that stand between a restaurant or a small market and the big seafood importers. Nice to meet you, thank you for having us. And this is a family business? I'm 3rd generation and it's been here for over 100 years, since the Meiji era. And always tuna? Yes, we only deal in bluefin tuna. Why tuna? Why not any of the other fish or seafood that's here? When I started this job, my family's business was already selling tuna. We can make our living just selling bluefin. We only deal with raw, wild-caught tuna. Without Tsukiji Market, we couldn't run a business like this. We trade tuna because it tastes good. I think bluefin is the king of tasty fish. How much does it matter that Maguro has such an important place in Japanese culture? Japan is surrounded by the sea and I think we are one of the biggest consumers of fish. Japan is surrounded by the sea and I think we are one of the biggest consumers of fish. So fish is very important to us, and a good source of protein. In the old days we could find enough quality fish from a single company. These days I can't find the right fish without going around to the other four fish companies. So I guess the fish are decreasing. And why do you think that the fish are, the amount of fish are declining? Many small fish are caught before they can lay eggs. Specifically, 90% of bluefin are caught around one or two years old. We need to have better age limit restrictions. I'm really worried about this. How much do your customers know or want to know, or care, about where the fish came from or how it was caught? Most people don't know how we catch fish. People have one or two pieces of sushi at a time. This is a serious issue, but it's hard for them to imagine. We must protect bluefin tuna at the breeding age or we'll have a tough time in the future. We must protect bluefin tuna at the breeding age or we'll have a tough time in the future. He's the 4th generation. And, so how do you think things will be different when he's in charge? Huge supermarkets are taking over a lot of our business so it will be tough. If you walk throughout the city you'll see that small open air markets are disappearing from the city. That small open air markets are disappearing from the city. That means we are losing clients and we'll face a very dire situation in the future. But it's not a dying business, it will always be here. A thriving business is another story. I was really surprised today to hear such grave concern from people at all levels of the tuna trade about some of the environmental consequences of bluefin overfishing. When I first started coming to this market a decade ago, you never heard that. I think what's changed is it's unavoidable. The facts are in everybody's face. They know that there's no way to make their businesses sustainable over the next generation unless they figure out a long term fix for this problem. I'm taking a short walk to the popular Sushi Dai restaurant inside the Tsukiji Market to see whats for sale at sushi bars in Japan. Hi. Hi. Sushi Dai is probably the most famous in the bunch. Regularly covered in the Japanese media. Often one of the first places that foreigners will taste sushi in Japan when they try to come to see the market as a tourist attraction. So how long has the shop been here? 23 years. 23 years. Yeah. What should I eat? What's good today? Yeah, tuna? Okay, yeah sure. The Japanese true bluefin is sort of the flagship seafood of the sushi bar. Often it's the item the chef has the most pride in. You hear a chef say I can be out of salmon one day, I can be out of the shrimp but if I'm out of bluefin my customers won't come back anymore. Is this wild or ranched? Of course it's wild! Always wild? All wild. Do you like ranched tuna? Well, the taste is very different from wild tuna. I can't say it has a bad taste, but farmed tuna has less flavor than wild tuna. I can't say it has a bad taste, but farmed tuna has less flavor than wild tuna. But if you ask me what has changed in the last 22 years, then I'd say farming technology has improved. What is "meji"? Baby tuna. Baby tuna? Yeah. And it's from Japan? Yes. Ok, and you think the flavor is different than a full grown tuna? Yeah. It's a little different. Why? Cuz big size tuna is so strong tasting, oily, fatty. But small, small ones not strong, has a good taste. And you can get it at the market here? Yeah. 90% of the Pacific bluefin catch are juveniles under two years old. Which means that they were removed from the water before they can reproduce. Sushi Dai shows that Japanese restaurant habits haven't been shaped by concerns over sustainability. And they're still driven by the chef's idea about taste. Very good. Not as oily as. Thank you very much. Thanks. It was very delicious. Traditionally, the Japanese government has been resistant to even talk about bluefin overfishing as a problem. I've come here to Yokohama to meet with Masanori Miyahara, President of the Fisheries Research Agency, to find out what the government's stance is today. What do we know about the current conditions of stocks for Pacific bluefin? The spawning stock is close to the historically lowest level. So we'd like to make sure that this stock is going up, building up. And we say spawning stock? Spawning stock. In easy terms, it's adult fish. And how did we get here? Can you sort of explain? Our ways of catching bluefin tuna are not so good, because we are catching too much small fish, child fish. So we have to restrict that part so that small fish can be an adult. That's the main purpose of the rebuilding plan now. I had lunch at Sushi Dai in Tsukiji market, and they had meiji. No, no, no. How will you convince a sushi chef who takes so much pride in his maguro? But you see, in the meeting with Tsukiji, they understand. But they do it as their business. It's bad behavior. The spawning ground is located only in Japan, Japanese waters. So you see, we have a responsibility to protect that fish. But you see, that fish migrates in a very wide range. At the age of just one year old, they go across the Pacific and go to California and Mexico, and Mexico is catching a lot of the young fish too. And Korea is also another big actor. But you see, we have to work with those countries so that conservation will be ensured for that species. What has changed in the sort of domestic politics in Japan to make the government more receptive to this than they were before? We learned a lot from that painful process with Atlantic bluefin tuna. We worked with the European Union but you see, we were too late, too late to take meaningful action. Now, Japan is a major market. We have to take our responsibility as a market. The management plan, what are the new rules, guidelines that have been set? First is the objective. The objective is to rebuild the adult fish to the average level within ten years. And to attain that objective we have to reduce the small fish catch as much as possible. So we decided at the first stage, 50% reduction of small fish catch. And I hope other countries will accept that. Then we can work together. United States is taking some distance from what we are doing. Because they are a little bit concerned about their sport fishermen. But you see, we can't wait for United States so that's why we decided to go ahead. My announcement not to eat small fish last year got so many complaints from consumers. Why are you, a government official, saying not to eat something?!? I'm not saying, you see, bluefin tuna should not be eaten. Bluefin will be eaten forever by reducing that catch of small fish now. >From the perspective of conservation of bluefin, what has innovations in ranching and farming meant? Yes, our farming industry is producing nearly 10,000 metric tons of bluefin tuna. But the majority of the fish originated from natural fish. So, they are using small fish. So, we have to reduce that kind of impact by introducing artificial hatcheries. And how successful has it been as- Technically, it's successful. And what are the challenges? But economically, not yet. We've heard a policy maker not only acknowledge overfishing of bluefin, but say it's an urgent concern about which Japan needs to be a leader on the world stage. For once, the Japanese are talking about their national interest being not only in catching bluefin, but in conserving them. To better understand the challenges of bringing farmed bluefin tuna to market, I've come to Kinki University's laboratory in the open waters off Kushimoto. Kinki University is an institution with large fisheries labs that have played an outsized role in Japanese aquaculture. Its biggest breakthrough, developed over 40 years, was learning how to breed bluefin tuna entirely in captivity. Those fish are now sold as Kindai Tuna. And so you've branded these fish. Kindai tuna is bred from the egg stage at the research institute and we grow them artificially in tanks in a closed cycle. We've trademarked it in Japan. And so when we say that Kinki was the first to complete the life cycle for bluefin tuna, what does that mean? It means that we can produce tuna in our preserve throughout their entire life cycle without using wild resources. That way we can protect the wild bluefin population, which is decreasing, while still maintaining our bluefin food supply. So this is where Kindai mackerel are. Yeah, it is. So what happens in this pen? We have 25 carrots over this pen. And this is a fish to get eggs from the production. How do fish, they get in here? We originally hatched from eggs and we transport from one tank to the net bank. And we feed them to bigger and bigger to grow up. When the fish are growing, how large do you get them before they're ready to harvest? Normally, we harvest three years. Okay. Two to three years. And how large is that, then? The average is 40 to 50 kilograms. Okay. And how long is a fish like that? Hundred, 1.5 meters. And how much of the feed is natural, and how much of it is chemicals or- We don't use chemicals. Okay. Everything is from nature. We feed these fish today, squid. Oh, okay. And so how much would a bluefin eat, one of these a day? Normally, we feed one to two parts into body weight. Per day? Yes. Okay. So are they eating? Can you see? What's going on? So sometimes we do different from the normal. They add something different, so they don't need squid now. So you wanna keep it calm, as though they're out in nature? I can say, tuna fish is more sensitive than the other fish. To the conditions? The conditions. Yeah. There we go. Is there a different taste or texture of the meat depending on what it eats? No, we try to compare it grow out by artificial diet and live bait. Taste, cost, everything. And have you seen any differences in? So far, not so large differences. Why did it take so much longer to successfully breed bluefin tuna? First of all, bluefin tuna's skin is so sensitive. If it gets scratched the fish can die very easily. So we had a tough time catching wild tuna in nets in order to build our stocks to farm them. After nine years of research, we finally succeeded in harvesting the eggs from the pen. We became the first to succeed in that process in the entire world. Still we're using natural resources for bait, which is a dilemma. So our ultimate goal is to research this more and make a 100% artificial bait. If we can do that, then I think we can create an excellent product. While Kinki University aims to triple its supply of bluefin tuna to 6,000 fish by 2020, that's still a long way off from satisfying all of Japan's demand for bluefin tuna. I talked to a lot of people who claim that they can taste the difference between a wild and farmed tuna. Certainly, you can see with your own eyes that the fat is distributed differently between the two, and it makes sense. Farmed tuna eat differently, they move differently, they metabolize differently. It makes sense that they would taste different. I think the real challenge is not so much figuring out how to make farmed fish taste like wild fish, or look like them but how to get Japanese consumers to accept farmed tuna on its own merits. Yoyogi Park, Shibuya, Tokyo. There are people working hard on the ground in Japan to change consumer attitudes, and in the process, preserve the Pacific bluefin. I'm here to meet with Wakao Hanaoka of Greenpeace, Japan, to talk about some of the environmental crises that they face with regard to the bluefin, and what they're trying to do to solve them. Do you eat sushi? I love sushi. Okay. And I have my son, and he love sushi also, and I want to enjoy, keep enjoying eating sushi for future also. What's the recommendation that Greenpeace makes? First, people should stop eating bluefin and also stop fishing bluefin tuna until we see the proper evidence of the restock recovery. In Japanese, we care very much about seafood. Seafood is really the essence of our food culture. So, we all want to keep enjoying it and also inherit to the next generation. To do that, the only way now, is that we stop eating for a while. We decide not to eat for a while. I cannot tell really how many years. It can be a few years, it can be decades, it can be longer. I was surprised, on this visit, that people we interview are far more ready to acknowledge that overfishing had existed and led to some problems and that it was the responsibility of people in the industry to be concerned about it. What do you think has driven sort of change of awareness? I think the biggest reason is the local fishermen are speaking out more, which influence the market players and the government but Japanese, we are a little bit unusual. If we know that there's not many more, then we start to compare each other like rush to finish. We want to have it before it finish. So if the price goes up and if it's more well known that there's only like this much tuna left, I think like, some rich people start doing this more but Pacific bluefin tuna, 80% of the catch was from Japan. Japan should take the lead, otherwise, it's us Japanese, ourself, we lose our food culture. Japanese government lose their face both from international society and from Japanese consumers. How does Greenpeace see bluefin farming? At this moment, consumers shouldn't think or like market players shouldn't think this as the solution of the Pacific bluefin tuna issue. One of the biggest concerns is that to make one meat of tuna, they need about 22 kilogram of small fish for the tuna's food. If you talk about the whole ecosystem in the ocean, it's not solution at all. It's pretty clear that people all across the market accept the underlying scientific reality that overfishing is a problem and that to preserve their future livelihoods, we're all going to have to do something about it. Unlike when I first started exploring the sushi trade a decade ago, I see a much greater willingness among people all around the world to acknowledge that overfishing has its consequences, and especially that our love for bluefin has an environmental cost but no one country's gonna do this on its own. You're not gonna see a single government crackdown on it's own businesses and as long as there's a big ocean with fish moving through it, this is gonna be a problem that needs more than one country to handle. Chefs may feel that they can do their part by taking bluefin off their menus and consumers may feel that they can do more by ordering more intelligently but are we really gonna expect people to put down their chopsticks and stop eating bluefin tuna for good? I doubt it. Politics, economics, diplomacy all have a part to play here but they're up against a far more persistent driver of human behavior, taste.
Info
Channel: Munchies
Views: 2,253,327
Rating: 4.6921005 out of 5
Keywords: Bluefin Tuna, Sushi, Japan, Los Angeles, Fish, Tuna, Tsukiji Market, Sushi Economy, Sushi economics, Providence Restaurant, Michael Cimarusti, Sasha Issenberg, The Sushi Economy, kindai tuna, sustainability, cooking, food, eating, chef, VICE, travel, vice guide, vice presents, healthy food
Id: hivvTo6VSS8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 36min 13sec (2173 seconds)
Published: Mon May 18 2015
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