Tuna Fish Stories: The Candidates Spin the Sushi

SOURCE: New York Times

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: January 25, 2008

It’s been a rough week.

The stock market has gone through more gyrations than an Elvis impersonator. The governor and the mayor announced budget plans that are based on revenue assumptions that may be as flimsy as a striking screenwriter’s bank account. The death of Heath Ledger was, of course, sad and unsettling.But nothing rattled some New Yorkers more than the news that high levels of mercury were found in tuna sushi sold in Manhattan stores and restaurants. Sushi is such a staple here these days that it’s almost as if the entire city has declared war on fish.While some New Yorkers shrugged off the mercury report, others worried about being turned into human thermometers. Given the likelihood that this is more than a local concern, it seemed worth seeking the views of the candidates who are still in the game of presidential Chutes and Ladders. They were all too busy traipsing around South Carolina and Florida to come to the phone, but their campaign staffs provided statements in their names.“Unlike other candidates, I have been saying since 2002 that we were headed down a disastrous road with our sushi policy,” Senator Barack Obama said. “But what we need now is a president who will not use this crisis just to scare up votes.”“We need a president who can get past the tired, old partisan divisions that pit one kind of fish against another,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s fine to get the mercury out of tuna. But all fish are in this together. We can’t rest until we have safe sushi of all types, all across this great land. To those who say we aim too high, we say, ‘Yes, we can.’ ”Former Senator John Edwards said that the sushi menace underlined the widening gulf between rich and poor. “We have to stand up for the millions of impoverished Americans who go to bed every night unable even to dream about tuna sushi,” he said. “This is the other America, not the fat cats plunking down $400 at places like Masa in New York.”“We need to speak up for the little guy,” Mr. Edwards said, “the guy who gets mercury poisoning and then sits for hours in a hospital emergency room because he can’t afford health insurance.”Just before saying he would drop out of the race, Representative Dennis Kucinich said that, as a vegan, he believed Americans should throw away the slice of fish (“tuna, salmon or yellowtail — they’re all the same”) and eat just the rice ball with a dash of wasabi.Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton warned against “false hopes” that the sushi menace would soon be over. She declined to pledge that, if elected, she would have all mercury out of tuna within four years. “But I can promise,” Mrs. Clinton said, “that on Day One, I will be ready for action.“Experience counts, and I’ve been eating sushi almost since that transforming day when I heard Martin Luther King speak in person.”YET former President Bill Clinton sought to tamp down talk of a crisis. “Don’t believe these fairy tales,” Mr. Clinton said. “But don’t roll the dice, either. The mercury isn’t a problem if ingested in small doses. Hillary and I are urging all you good people who love tuna maki to cut it into little pieces. Dice the roll.”On the Republican side, Senator John McCain repeated a line from just before the New Hampshire primary. “I’m too old to be scared,” he said. “My friends, we’ve been through hard times before, but we can overcome this transcendent challenge. I don’t have to tell you, my friends, about my years in Asia. I have the experience, my friends, to handle this sushi ordeal.”Former Gov. Mitt Romney blamed imported tuna. “It’s all that immigrant fish,” he said. “We’re not controlling our borders. I promise you that on my watch we will not be a sanctuary for dangerous foreign tuna.”Former Gov. Mike Huckabee urged Americans to avoid raw fish of any type, regardless of national origin. “Nowhere does the Bible mention sushi in the Garden of Eden,” he said. “Give me that old-time cuisine. If it was good enough for Adam and Eve, it’s good enough for me.”Representative Ron Paul said that New York had brought the mercury attack on itself by having “invaded foreign waters” in search of ever more tuna for insatiable diners. That brought a sharp rebuke from former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York. “I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for the attack, but not that one,” Mr. Giuliani said.Still, “this is a very, very serious problem,” he said, “and I don’t want to minimize how very, very important it is.“But trust me, Sept. 11 was a lot worse.”

How not to eat sushi…

Jan Moir
Sunday October 21, 2007
Observer Food Monthly

Anyone can tell you how to eat sushi. There are sushi bores from here to Japan who just can’t wait to explain how not to dip the rice side of your nigiri into the soy sauce and to always eat it in one bite. Only use chopsticks for sashimi. Use your fingers for sushi rolls, and on a mixed platter, always eat the rolls with the seaweed on the outside first. Never mix the wasabi into your soy sauce, you sushi-snacking peasant. In fact, you must only ever eat wasabi with sashimi, while smugly acknowledging that the bright-green fusion of chemicals on your plate, a mixture of horseradish and mustard powders laced with food dye, bears little resemblance to the subtle complexity of true wasabi, the best of which is grown in gravel stream beds under black curtains in an area to the south west of Tokyo.

Impart this information at every godforsaken opportunity. Remind all that you started eating sushi years ago, long before it became the rage. Make your date feel small by pointing out that the pickled ginger should be used as an inter-course palate cleanser, not as an accompaniment. Always eat the sashimi garnish, which will usually be a bit of green stuff and some radishy nubbins. Knock three times on the ceiling if you want more. Twice on the pipes, bing, bing, means you are choking on a lump of bigeye and require a glass of water.

On and on and on it goes, a riot of sushi rules and regulations, of customs and etiquette demanded by tradition and, yes, a certain amount of snivelling food snobbery, all to consume a simple snack of rice balls and fish. Samurai warriors never had this problem. They just tossed it down like krill and got on with perfecting their pony tails and making lush tartare of their enemies. In comparison, today’s sushi diners are faced with a barrage of dilemmas before they even sit down at the counter to crack open their disposable wooden chopsticks. Yet increasingly, the most important question they must ask themselves is not how to eat sushi, but how not to eat sushi.

What started off as a way of preserving the fish that were left high and dry in paddy fields following floods is now it is taking over the world. The problem with sushi today is not how to manoeuvre kappamaki from plate to mouth without everyone screaming with laughter at your lack of technique, but how to escape the stuff. The planet is awash with California rolls and strips of inferior salmon trapped in little coffins of rice. Sushi is in the supermarket, in shopping malls, in sandwich shops, at the airport. It is available from Mumbai to Morecambe, in Des Moines and in des res everywhere. Most notoriously, it is available at high-end restaurants where gourmands pay huge sums to be titillated by scraps of the finest seafood. At Masa in New York, which holds the distinction of being the most expensive restaurant in America, customers pay around $300 for the basic omakase menu at Masayoshi Takayama’s sushi bar.

At Umu in London, chefs in geta sandals hand-squeeze sushi and serve real wasabi to high rollers who don’t mind indulging themselves with three-figure-plus bills. Just like the eel they serve, no one gets out of Umu, or restaurants like it, without being skinned. Alive, if possible. Unagi tastes better if the chefs cut them open while the creatures are still squirming, because the taste component breaks down rapidly once death sets in. Perhaps that’s why sushi presentation is so abstract and so pretty; it disguises the bloodlust and brutal murder that goes on behind the scenes.

If you are the kind of diner who is willing to dice with mercury poisoning and scomboid side effects, then eating raw fish does clearly have health benefits. I mean, have you ever seen a dolphin with acne or depression? They all look as sleek as seals who, incidentally, are no slouches themselves if there’s any sashimi in the offing. However, anyone gorging on crunchy tuna rolls and avocado/crab combos in the great sushi middle market that is taking over the world should not be deluding themselves that what they are eating is a healthy product. It is an empty banquet of fishy Liquorice Allsorts, bullets of starchy carbs, lozenges of sugared, factory rice with a central vein of greasy, farmed fish. Did Carrie and co realise they were dicing with empty carbs when they chatted over uramaki at Manhattan’s Sushi Samba in Sex and the City? Did Lindsay Lohan realise what she was ingesting in last year’s sushi-fuelled romcom, Just My Luck? Salmon and tuna are farmed in great, sea cages to feed the global sushi market. Trapped in the deep, they grow fat through a lack of exercise and room to move. It is this very fatness – toro, the fatty tuna belly is highly prized – that gives sushi lovers the ‘melt in the mouth’ sensation that they crave. ‘Sushi makes me hum, and I only hum after sex,’ says Julian Clary, which is possibly a sushi fact too far. Meanwhile a Japanese news agency claims that Princess Diana was recently spotted alive and well in a sushi restaurant in Chigasaki where she was eating whale – a ‘delicacy denied her during her years as a princess’. Really, sushi is spooky stuff. Take my advice. Just say no. At least to sushi bores, if not to sushi itself.