By Adam Rabiner
Sushi: The Global Catch, like slow food, is best consumed unhurriedly. The film rolls out patiently, in broad brush strokes. Fourth generation master chefs display their craftsmanship and skill, in beautifully photographed scenes, cutting fish, making sushi, and sharpening fine Japanese cutlery. The film then detours from restaurateurs to a four hundred year old shop where the proprietor quenches and tempers swords and displays other traditional and time-consuming knife-making techniques. The movie eventually settles on Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, the largest fish market in the world, with many businesses extending back at least two centuries.
In this world an apprentice starts out in the kitchen washing dishes, spends two years learning to prepare rice properly, is not allowed to handle a knife for the first year and a half - and then only to chop vegetables for two years until graduating to fish. It is not until one’s fifth year that an apprentice is allowed to assist a master chef and it is a seven year wait until this helper is permitted to deliver sushi rolls and platters to customers and make small talk with them. No wonder, then, that it is not until half an hour into the film that one gains an inkling about what Sushi: The Global Catch is primarily about, namely the unsustainability of the global fishing industry and the threatened state of wild tuna.
Tuna is the star of this documentary. Mature Bluefin, Pacific, and Atlantic tuna take many years to reach full maturity. At the top of the food chain and evolutionary tree, it has been described as the Porsche of the oceans: massive (as big as 1,500 pounds), hydrodynamic sprinters built for speed yet also possessing the endurance of marathoners, and expensive – on January 4th, 2011 a single Bluefin tuna sold for a record breaking $400,000 in auction. Despite international agreements to protect this valuable resource, global governance is weak, penalties are unenforced, and illegal overfishing is routine.
Sushi started in Tokyo, then spread to the rest of Japan and then to the world. Between different types of sushi, tuna is the king of raw fish. The tuna connoisseur, like a butcher who knows his beef parts, will distinguish between the fish’s cuts: chutoro, otoro, and akami. A taste for uncooked fish, combined with the growth of a global middle class and modern shipping and refrigeration technologies, has spurred growing markets in China, Russia, India, and Brazil. Today you will find sushi restaurants in practically every country in the world and supply is not keeping up with demand.
This sad state of affairs threatens not just the tuna species, but the entire ocean ecosystem. Imagine aquatic life depicted as a pyramid of four balanced levels with tuna at the top. Below are three descending magnitudes of fish until you reach the bottom of the food chain. If the tuna at the top of the pyramid is killed off, then without a natural predator the layer directly below them would explode in population. This second tier of fish would prey upon the third tier under them, depleting their own food supply and causing their own starvation. At that point all you would be left with is the fourth tier of jelly fish and sea urchins. This is the scary but possible future of the seas.
So what to do? One answer is to boycott tuna. This is the “blanket approach” adopted by Casson Trenor, a Green Peace activist and the owner of San Francisco’s Tataki restaurant, whose mission is to “showcase the beauty and delicacy of Japanese cuisine while respecting the sanctity and fragility of our environment.” You won’t find tuna on Tataki’s menu.
Or you could look to more sustainably harvested tuna. That is the solution being pursued by Hagen Stehr, a German born fisherman who jumped ship in Australia as a young man and become one of Australia’s richest and most successful businessmen. Stehr is a pioneer in aquaculture whose research is focused on breeding and raising the Southern Bluefin tuna in land-based tanks.
Something fascinating and unusual occurs towards the end of the documentary. Trenor and Alistair Douglas, an Australian with a Ph.D. in marine biology working for a company, EcoHub Holdings, engage in a real debate about the future of tuna and the nature of sustainability. The scientist, who is trying to get Trenor to buy his product, attempts to convince the restaurant owner and advocate that the blanket approach of banning will fail to save the tuna. He argues that the future of the fish rests with a company like his which captures wild, mature tuna then cages and feeds them before market, a practice called “ranching,” as distinct from “farming.” Everything takes place in a well-controlled and regulated environment. Their fish are even traceable by DNA testing, to ensure authenticity. Trenor remains unconvinced.
Documentaries often veer towards the didactic, telling viewers what to think. Food related documentaries, in particular (think of the many anti-GMO films), are skeptical that science can provide the answers. That Sushi: The Global Catch raises these questions but does not settle them is testament to this film’s deliberate, but by no means boring, style and a tribute to the film maker’s own well-honed skills and craft.
Sushi: The Global Catch, like slow food, is best consumed unhurriedly. The film rolls out patiently, in broad brush strokes. Fourth generation master chefs display their craftsmanship and skill, in beautifully photographed scenes, cutting fish, making sushi, and sharpening fine Japanese cutlery. The film then detours from restaurateurs to a four hundred year old shop where the proprietor quenches and tempers swords and displays other traditional and time-consuming knife-making techniques. The movie eventually settles on Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, the largest fish market in the world, with many businesses extending back at least two centuries.
In this world an apprentice starts out in the kitchen washing dishes, spends two years learning to prepare rice properly, is not allowed to handle a knife for the first year and a half - and then only to chop vegetables for two years until graduating to fish. It is not until one’s fifth year that an apprentice is allowed to assist a master chef and it is a seven year wait until this helper is permitted to deliver sushi rolls and platters to customers and make small talk with them. No wonder, then, that it is not until half an hour into the film that one gains an inkling about what Sushi: The Global Catch is primarily about, namely the unsustainability of the global fishing industry and the threatened state of wild tuna.
Tuna is the star of this documentary. Mature Bluefin, Pacific, and Atlantic tuna take many years to reach full maturity. At the top of the food chain and evolutionary tree, it has been described as the Porsche of the oceans: massive (as big as 1,500 pounds), hydrodynamic sprinters built for speed yet also possessing the endurance of marathoners, and expensive – on January 4th, 2011 a single Bluefin tuna sold for a record breaking $400,000 in auction. Despite international agreements to protect this valuable resource, global governance is weak, penalties are unenforced, and illegal overfishing is routine.
Sushi started in Tokyo, then spread to the rest of Japan and then to the world. Between different types of sushi, tuna is the king of raw fish. The tuna connoisseur, like a butcher who knows his beef parts, will distinguish between the fish’s cuts: chutoro, otoro, and akami. A taste for uncooked fish, combined with the growth of a global middle class and modern shipping and refrigeration technologies, has spurred growing markets in China, Russia, India, and Brazil. Today you will find sushi restaurants in practically every country in the world and supply is not keeping up with demand.
This sad state of affairs threatens not just the tuna species, but the entire ocean ecosystem. Imagine aquatic life depicted as a pyramid of four balanced levels with tuna at the top. Below are three descending magnitudes of fish until you reach the bottom of the food chain. If the tuna at the top of the pyramid is killed off, then without a natural predator the layer directly below them would explode in population. This second tier of fish would prey upon the third tier under them, depleting their own food supply and causing their own starvation. At that point all you would be left with is the fourth tier of jelly fish and sea urchins. This is the scary but possible future of the seas.
So what to do? One answer is to boycott tuna. This is the “blanket approach” adopted by Casson Trenor, a Green Peace activist and the owner of San Francisco’s Tataki restaurant, whose mission is to “showcase the beauty and delicacy of Japanese cuisine while respecting the sanctity and fragility of our environment.” You won’t find tuna on Tataki’s menu.
Or you could look to more sustainably harvested tuna. That is the solution being pursued by Hagen Stehr, a German born fisherman who jumped ship in Australia as a young man and become one of Australia’s richest and most successful businessmen. Stehr is a pioneer in aquaculture whose research is focused on breeding and raising the Southern Bluefin tuna in land-based tanks.
Something fascinating and unusual occurs towards the end of the documentary. Trenor and Alistair Douglas, an Australian with a Ph.D. in marine biology working for a company, EcoHub Holdings, engage in a real debate about the future of tuna and the nature of sustainability. The scientist, who is trying to get Trenor to buy his product, attempts to convince the restaurant owner and advocate that the blanket approach of banning will fail to save the tuna. He argues that the future of the fish rests with a company like his which captures wild, mature tuna then cages and feeds them before market, a practice called “ranching,” as distinct from “farming.” Everything takes place in a well-controlled and regulated environment. Their fish are even traceable by DNA testing, to ensure authenticity. Trenor remains unconvinced.
Documentaries often veer towards the didactic, telling viewers what to think. Food related documentaries, in particular (think of the many anti-GMO films), are skeptical that science can provide the answers. That Sushi: The Global Catch raises these questions but does not settle them is testament to this film’s deliberate, but by no means boring, style and a tribute to the film maker’s own well-honed skills and craft.