The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

Because the ...

these fish is silvery, sushi chefs also call them hikari mono...

Most commercial wasabi served in sushi bars isn’t wasabi at all. It’s a mix of

horseradish powder, mustard powder, mustard extract, citric acid, yellow dye no. 5, and blue dye no. 1. Real wasabi is a rare and finicky plant. It’s hard to grow, nearly impossible to keep fresh, tricky to prepare, and absurdly expensive.

Wasabi and horseradish are cousins. Along with mustard and regular radishes,

they belong to the cabbage family. Being a cabbage has its drawbacks. Members of the cabbage family do not possess legs and can’t run away from predators. Instead, cabbages have evolved a high-tech defense system that would turn heads at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Inside their cells they store an innocent-looking, sugar-laced compound called

glucosinolate. In separate compartments nearby, the plants store an enz...

When an insect or slug, for instance, bites into a member of the cabbage family, it’s in for a rude shock. By breaking into the plant’s cells, the predator cracks open the compartments, and the compound and the enz...

converting it to an intense irritant called isothiocyanate, known to most people as mustard oil. Mustard oil is a highly volatile substance that converts rapidly to a gas and irritates mucous membranes...

Mustard oil is so toxic that it damages the plant as much as it hurts the predator, which is why cabbages...

attached. True wasabi is native only to Japan and Sakhalin Island, a Russian outpost off Japan’s northern coast. It creates a derivative form of mustard oil called methylsulfinyl isothiocyanate. In humans, sulfinyl in small amounts can trigger a beneficial immune resp...

“Nytai-mori!”

sushi served on a naked woman.

“Parasites. Salmon are susceptible to parasites.”

worse than

mackerel.

anisakis ...

tapeworm

parasites

are complex, multi-celled organisms. Cooking will kill them, but so will cold enough temperatures. The solution for raw salmon, Zoran explained, was to freeze the fish in the restaurant’s industrial freezer.

FDA recommends that distributors or restaurants freeze all fish that will be served raw for eighteen hours at -31°F, a temperature that only a high-powered

blast freezer can achieve. At the more conventional temperature of -4°F, the FDA points out that the fish has to be kept frozen for an entire week to destroy parasites.

Most home freezers don’t go muc...

all fish may have their origins in freshwater. Between about

350 and 400 million years ago the earth exploded with new life forms. In the ocean, the wormlike fishes evolved into new species. Some of these moved into freshwater. There they developed skeletons made of hard bone. Subsequently, many of them

returned to the ocean with their new equipment and recolon...

Salmon live in both worlds. Salmon are born in freshwater, spend from one to five years in the sea, and return to freshwater and fight their way up raging rivers to spawn in the streams of their birth. Why go to such trouble? In the relatively cold

climates at higher latitudes, where salmon live, the ocean provides a richer buffet of nourishing food than freshwater. But freshwater streams are safer places for babies to grow up. By taking advantage of both environments, salmon eat well, and their eggs and young have high survival rates.

At sea, salmon are handsome and respectable-looking silver fish. By the

time they return to their home streams, depending on the species, they have developed green heads, bright-red skin, bizarre color patterns, beaked jaws with nasty teeth, and hunched backs.

Plants living near salmon streams contain large amounts of nourishing nitrogen,

Tree growth near

salmon streams is three times greater than near comparable str...

To a sushi chef, salmon doesn’t qualify as a red fish. It’s a white fish because the color doesn’t belong to the fish. Salmon farming operations must add pigment to the feed or their farmed salmon will turn out white and disappoint the consumer.

The farmed fish was soft, pale, and striped with thick streaks of fat. And, by comparison, it tasted bland.

Unfortunately, lack of

flavor and texture isn’t the only downside. All that fat in farmed salmon is loaded with around seven times the PCBs—polychlorinated biphenyls, likely a cause of cancer—that wild salmon contain.

full of antibiotics,

The muscles of most creatures

are divided into two types: fast-twitch fibers and slow-twitch fibers. Fast-twitch fibers are the sprinters—the muscles move quickly, but they also tire out quickly. Slow-twitch fibers are the marathoners—the muscles move slowly, but they keep going for a long time. Fast muscles are light-colored or translucent. At Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey’s white meat is fast

muscle—turkeys only beat their wings in short bursts. Turkeys spend most of their time walking around, which is why their legs are slow muscle. That’s the dark meat. The muscles of many mammals, including...

Fish muscle ought to consist mostly of slow-twitch fibers because fish are con...

But water is a weird place. Swimming through it slowly is easy, especially if you’re shaped like a fish. But if you try to go fast, the density of the water suddenly hits you like a wall. Resistance increases exponentially with speed. This means that for most fish, the muscles they use const...

side of the body, usually right under the skin. The cross section of a salmon steak, for example, has small triangles of dark meat nestled against the skin on either side. These are the slow-twitch fibers that the salmon uses for most of its regular swimming. If fish never needed to swim fast, they’d all be narrow shaft...

is an emergency power pack of pale, fast-twitch fibers that kicks in when the fish needs to sprint. Fast-twitch fibers function well in quick, short bursts because they contain their own fuel supply of preloaded carbs. Enzymes inside the fibers convert this fuel into quick energy. The conversion occurs so fast that t...

without oxygen, but not for long. They soon shut down for refueling, a...

By contrast, slow-twitch fibers burn fat for fuel, which requires lots of oxygen. These fat-burning factories hire fleets of delivery trucks to fetch oxygen and bring it to the factory, so they don’t have to shut down. ...

the factory, part of the machinery that uses oxygen to burn fat are proteins called cytochromes. Myoglobin and cytochromes both possess a kind of hook for holding on to oxygen. The hook is made of iron. These iron-containing proteins are red, ...

Independent researchers have conducted thorough investigations into farmed salmon, revealing that the fish accumulate much higher levels of PCBs from their feed

than do wild salmon.