Tataki Sushi and Sake Bar was the first sustainable sushi restaurant in the United States. When it opened in February 2008, however, it was to deafening silence from the culinary scene. Little money was available to spend on advertising and fanfare; chef/owners Kin Lui and Raymond Ho had already put themselves deep in debt merely through attending to the bare necessities that came with opening a restaurant. Although I was lucky enough to be involved in concept and development, I certainly wasn’t able to bring any money to the table.
The vision behind the restaurant was simple – to prove that sushi and ocean conservation did not necessarily run at odds in one another, and that in fact one could do honor to the art form and hold true to the pursuit of excellence that is part and parcel of the cuisine, while at the same time respecting and nurturing the bounty of our oceans.
Sounds simple enough, right?
Not in our house
There were some major challenges right out of the gate. The five most popular sushi items in the United States – open-containment farmed salmon, farmed shrimp, longlined yellowfin tuna, farmed Japanese amberjack, and ranched freshwater eel were all unequivocally unsustainable choices. They all had to go, as did the biggest moneymaker of them all: bluefin tuna.
An even bigger challenge has been the lack of a full kitchen. Tataki has had to cope with this since day one. Frankly, though, it has only served to show how much more a hypothetical sustainable sushi chef could do with a full suite of tools.
The Tataki menu has evolved over time, but not a single one of the aforementioned products has ever blemished its pages. This has been a struggle in some ways, but in others, it’s actually proven surprisingly easy. An example? Replacing farmed salmon.
I can't believe it's not eel!
Since farmed salmon was never an option for us, Tataki has always offered arctic char in its place. We expected some degree of resistance from our customers, but it has never materialized. The char was instantly popular among our diners and to this day remains one of the restaurant’s best sellers. We bring in wild Alaskan salmon as well, but as this is a seasonal product, it is a delicacy that we are not able to offer on a daily basis.
Eel was replaced with faux-nagi, Chef Kin Lui’s brainchild. This sablefish-based dish delivers the deep, dusky sweetness and fatty texture of unagi, but doesn’t rely on an overfished product.
The chefs eschew bluefin toro in favor of the sweet, supple belly flesh of local pole-and-line albacore. Hamachi was never an option either, due to the state of stocks and the rapacity of the industry. Instead, Tataki’s offers farmed Hawaiian kanpachi (as well as wild amberjack, depending on the season.)
Welcome back, vegans
Tataki also boasts a thorough vegetarian selection. It seemed to us that vegetarians had been severely marginalized when it came to sushi — how many cucumber rolls can you eat before the experience becomes unbearably mundane? Moreover, vegetarians are, by definition, sustainable seafood supporters insofar as they would never order bluefin, eel, farmed salmon, or other dangerous options. Kin and Raymond put a tremendous amount of thought into designing a menu that offers both vegetarians and vegans alike a plethora of animal-free delights.
The vast majority of Tataki’s customers are thrilled about the options. Sure, we have the odd one or two patrons that lament our lack of unagi or toro, but we’ve found that the gains vastly outweigh the losses.
While the restaurant’s popularity has continued to grow, nothing could have prepared us for a recent event that both flattered and humbled us to no end. In its October 5th issue, Time Magazine declared Raymond, Kin and myself “Environmental Heroes of the Year” in honor of our work with sustainable sushi.
Our little corner of the industry
As ecstatic as we are about this award, it is actually our hope that our little operation will soon be forgotten amidst the dozens, even hundreds, of other restaurants and grocery stores that make the switch to a more responsible method of selling sushi. A niche restaurant may command a distinct market share, but it will not change the world; it cannot save the oceans. A vanguard restaurant, however, defines itself by the slow demise of its individuality. We at Tataki will know that we’ve succeeded in our mission when, from an environmental perspective, there is nothing to distinguish us from any other sushi bar.
The concept of sustainability is ballooning within the public consciousness, and with each passing day, the ideals of a sustainable lifestyle penetrate further into our daily existence. For all of us in the Tataki family, it has been and continues to be a true honor to play a role in the development of sustainable sushi.
Tags: albacore, bar, bluefin, casson, diners, eel, environmental hero, fauxnagi, hamachi, ho, kanpachi, kin, lui, raymond, restaurant, salmon, shrimp, sushi, sustainable, Tataki Sushi and Sake Bar, time, trenor, tuna, vanguard, vegan, vegetarian
Net full of problems
Anyone who has seen one of my presentations or endured my presence on a panel has probably heard me lambaste bluefin tuna ranching. I often employ a hackneyed analogy to describe this phenomenon by equating ranching bluefin to “farming tigers.” The reasoning behind this has to do with the position that bluefin occupies in the oceanic food web. Bluefin tuna are top carnivores in the watery realms, and thus are similar to the great cats and other apex predators here on terra firma.
The point here is simple: we don’t farm great cats. Not just because they don’t taste good (although I can’t imagine that they do), but because it makes exactly zero sense from the perspective of an agriculturist. A tiger farmer would have to raise or purchase grass or grain to feed herbivores (such as cows), raise and fatten the cows, and then slaughter the cows to feed the tigers. The amount of salable protein generated by butchering the tigers would be only a fraction of what the farmer could realize by butchering and selling the cows (not to mention how much more efficient it would be to simply sell the grain itself for human consumption.)
There are two differences between a bluefin ranch and a theoretical tiger farm from a markets perspective. The first is demand. Aside from a peripheral black market, based primarily in China, that values the penis and gall bladder of the animal for pseudo-medicinal purposes, there is no demand for tiger flesh. Bluefin, unfortunately, is struggling under the weight of tremendous demand driven by a rapidly expanding sushi industry.
Top cat
The second difference is the legal recognition (and a strong social awareness) of the animal’s plight. All of the world’s tiger subspecies are, lamentably, endangered at best. Ironically, the charisma of the tiger and the widespread awareness of its unenviable situation has earned it a tremendous amount of support in the form of global conservation effort. In fact, the tiger was voted the “world’s favorite animal” in a 2005 survey by Animal Planet (even defeating such lovable competitors as the dog and the dolphin.)
The bluefin tuna has no such succor. It is a migratory oceanic species and thus extremely difficult to protect through national legislation. International agreements such as ICCAT continue to fail to address the actual issues threatening the species (overfishing, bycatch, etc.) Moreover, while this animal is fascinating and extremely charismatic to those fortunate few who have interacted with it, the bluefin still suffers from the “it’s just a fish” veil of dismissal that keeps us at arm’s length from many of our ocean’s most awe-inspiring denizens.
Feeding food to food
The point of all this is to say that while we would never consider farming tigers as a protein source, we farm bluefin in great numbers, despite their relatively equivalent positions in their respective ecosystems. It’s an incredibly resource-intensive task to farm a bluefin. For every salable pound of tuna that comes out of a bluefin farm, up to twenty-five pounds of wild fish (often sardines and anchoveta from unmanaged fisheries) have gone in as feed. To make matters worse, bluefin are only very rarely reared ex ovo; traditionally, the juveniles are purloined from the wild and transferred to pens for fattening. Thus, every tuna that one purchases from a bluefun tuna farm is actually a wild tuna that never had an opportunity to breed. Needless to say, the world’s wild bluefin tuna populations are shadows of their former selves. The bluefin is, for all intents and purposes, an endangered species. Yet we continue to devour it without compunction.
Things seem bleak, indeed. And it is from this stark landscape that a new player has arisen, with a plan to ease the pressure.
Maybe.
Hawaii Oceanic Technology, a Honolulu-based company, is aiming to create a new tuna farm that instead of adding to the woes of the bluefin, will focus on one of it’s relatives: Thunnus obesus, the bigeye tuna. Ostensibly, this will lessen the overall pressure on bluefin by offering a similar fish to appease market demand.
Net pen aquaculture
While bluefin is generally fattened in inshore net pens, Hawaii Oceanic intends to construct an offshore farm, located about three miles off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. One of the potential advantages of offshore aquaculture is that it is thought to reduce the impact of waste by allowing effluent to diffuse through a much deeper water column. The revolutionary Kona Blue operation, similarly located in Hawaii, utilizes this principle in its production of Seriola rivioliana, which it markets as “Kona Kampachi.”
While there is still a pronounced paucity of evidence regarding this hypothesis, it seems to be based on reasonable assumptions, and I don’t want to dwell on it as I feel there are three other, more important issues at stake. Additionally, the prototype “Oceanspheres” that Hawaii Oceanic are developing for use as fish enclosures are really quite impressive — especially their use of OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) technology, which is a virtually untapped renewable energy resource. I’m very interested to see where this leads.
Anyhow, back to the issues at hand.
Sexy sexy tuna belly
First off: market demand. Bigeye tuna, known as mebachi in Japanese, is indeed a source of tuna fillets, fatty belly cuts, etc. But to be frank, mebachi toro is simply not as alluring as honmaguro (bluefin) toro. As a matter of fact, the best replacement that I have found for the buttery, supple taste and texture of bluefin belly is high-quality shiromaguro toro – a belly cut from the albacore, bluefin’s much smaller cousin. I am not alone in my beliefs here. Sure, mebachi is still a much-demanded fish, but will it really affect the demand for bluefin?
The second issue is feed. As I mentioned before, farming bluefin is a protein-hungry business. Why would farming bigeye be any different? Hawaii Oceanic states that their goal is to eventually replace the fish used in the feed process with soy or an algae-based protein source, but that they will need to use fish meal at first.
Certainly one has to begin any new venture in stages… but how long are we talking about? There is no need for another fish-based tuna farm. There was never any environmental benefit to these operations in the first place. If indeed it were a farm fed entirely from sustainable sources, that would potentially change the equation — but there’s a big word between now and then, and that word is “eventually.” The lack of a hard timetable here casts some doubt on the rosy picture that Hawaii Oceanic has painted.
The final issue is the sourcing of the fish itself. One of the major problems with bluefin farms is that the fish are taken as juveniles from flagging wild stocks. Hawaii Oceanic pledges to surmount this obstacle by hatching bigeye from eggs in a controlled facility. These fry would then be transferred to the offshore pens for rearing.
"Mommy, where does tuna come from?"
This is a good plan, if it can be achieved. In essence, by allowing the company to breed tuna from a small clutch of broodstock rather than abducting wild fish, they can produce tuna without major detrimental impacts to the local populations (at least from a sourcing perspective.) But can they do it?
The A-Marine Kindai bluefin operation in Japan has managed to create a system where they hatch their fish in a similar manner. This type of aquaculture, known as “closed life cycle farming,” is certainly a step in the right direction. But is it missing the point?
Wow! Four pounds of fish in a convenient three-ounce package
Even if this kind of thing ends up working, we’re still dealing with an apex predator, and thus eating very high on the food chain. When trophic dynamics are considered, it becomes clear that the amount of energy demanded from natural (or, in this case, quasi-natural) cycles to produce something like a farmed tuna dwarfs the actual amount of protein received by the consumer. Farming this kind of animal is reinforcing a negative paradigm that has been held as gospel in the North American diet for far too long. Moreover, tuna do not have the fish oils and the omega-3s that many smaller, cold-water fish (such as mackerel and sardines) do, nor do they reproduce as quickly. Not to mention that this type of aquaculture is never going to “feed the world” — it’s simply too expensive.
Now that's progress!
While Hawaii Oceanic may be attempting to build a better mousetrap with this theoretical bigeye farm, we may be swapping tigers for lions. It we want a harmonious and sustainable relationship with the world’s oceans, it will take more than finding a way to create larger amounts of what the market currently demands. We need to be willing to significantly alter the way that we think about food, and I’m not sure how much of a change a bigeye farm really represents.
Tags: a-marine, albacore, animal, bigeye, bluefin, china, farm, hawaii, ICCAT, kampachi, kanpachi, kindai, kona, lion, mebachi, oceanic, oceansphere, OTEC, protein, ranch, sardine, shiromaguro, technology, tiger, toro, trophic
Posted by Casson on Jan 11, 2009 in
Science and Rankings,
Update The original entry on hamachi (buri) has been split into three distinct chapters — hamachi (buri), kanpachi, and hiramasa. This allows for a more precise focus on these three important and significantly different industries.
Recommendations have changed for hiramasa.
Tags: almaco jack, amberjack, hamachi, hiramasa, jack, kanpachi, yellowtail
