Seriously Sustainable Sushi

By  by Julie Hanus
Published on May 14, 2009
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In the age of sustainable seafood, sushi can be a decidedly guilty pleasure–if a permissible pleasure at all. Those glistening slices of hamachi? Most likely not what you’d call earth-friendly fare. The latest issue of Edible San Francisco, however, profiles two restaurateurs out to prove that sushi can be served without a side of environmental destruction.

At Tataki, Raymond Ho and Kin Lui exclusively serve sustainable seafood. It’s a substantial commitment, considering that the five most popular sushi items–salmon, hamachi, shrimp, uangi, and tuna–are rarely ocean friendly. But with some help from FishWise business director Casson Trenor, the chefs have found some creative ways to proceed. They skip salmon in favor of farmed arctic char. Instead of eel (nagi), they offer delicately blow-torched strips of Canadian black cod.

“Faux-nagi asks for a certain willing suspension of disbelief, heavy emphasis on the willing,” Edible San Francisco reports. But the alternative–“rolling the [most popular] five until fisheries crash and sushi as we know it drifts off into extinction, like a polar bear on an ice floe”–doesn’t exactly whet the appetite.

For those of us who don’t live in the Bay Area, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a special sushi edition of its trusty seafood guide. And for fun additional reading about sustainable seafood, visit Utne Reader‘s Sustainable Seafood Project, which includes excerpts from the exquisite book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.

Source: Edible San Francisco

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