Life in the Raw

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The ancient precursor of sushi would probably be unrecognizable to the modern diner. Raw fish was packed in jars with layers of rice and fermented for weeks, like pungent cheese. These days, of course, sushi is as innocuous as a Big Mac, and just as ubiquitous. In The Zen of Fish, Trevor Corson reports that even the Wal-Mart in Plano, Texas, has its own sushi counter.

Corson's is one of two recent books to track sushi's evolution from a street snack in Edo Japan to yuppie haute cuisine to fast food served on conveyor belts. The surge of interest among non-Japanese writers underscores sushi's current international cachet. Corson argues that that popularity is actually undermining sushi's quintessential Japaneseness: it has become a truly global food. Indeed, he tells his story primarily through a young American woman training at a sushi academy, not in Tokyo, but in Los Angeles. Corson spends altogether too much time describing her floundering "battle with fish" (in his view, becoming a sushi chef is only slightly less difficult than becoming a surgeon, and requires a considerably stronger stomach). But his book is also peppered with fascinating diversions into the macho culture of sushi bars, the physiology of octopuses, and the cultivation of wasabi, a plant so rare that sushi restaurants almost always substitute a blend of mustard powder and horseradish.

The fact that sushi is so commonplace — even if one of its principal condiments is not — is a miracle of modern commerce. In The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg follows fish along a formidable logistics chain stretching from Canadian fishermen to Japanese auctioneers to Libyan tuna smugglers. He describes a patchwork economy in which traders bid thousands on a carcass, and minor variations in weather send ripples across continents. In Issenberg's view, the sushi trade symbolizes a "virtuous global commerce" — a system of exchange in which handshakes and individual innovations trump the faceless forces of multinational corporations. "Power is decentralized," he writes, "and supply and demand are regulated not by moguls but by local ideas about value and taste."

Yet neither he nor Corson meaningfully address what the insatiable demand for sushi is doing to the planet's supply of fish. The slow-maturing bluefin tuna, for instance, the most prized sushi fish in Japan, is already imperiled. And the bluefin may only be the first to disappear: as Corson notes, scientists have estimated that all of the world's ocean fish will be gone by 2050. The sushi boom may represent the triumph of benign globalization, but its net effect will be emptier seas.