King of Sushi in a Coffin

Last night 60 minutes aired a special on the King of Sushi, now available online. The presenter begins in Toykyo's Tsukiji market--a $4 billion per year fisheries trading post that Harvard anthropologist Ted Bestor describes as the "Wall Street of fish with no futures market." They watch as one 450-lb. bluefin is brought in its 'tuna coffin' (see image) and then sold for $8500. But where is the tuna coming from?

Next stop is the Mediterranean to witness the Mattanza or annual tuna slaughter. The tonnaras, a complex system of nets to catch tuna as well as a thousand-year-old right of passage for the local men (who learned how to set the nets, sing songs about tuna, and speak an entire tonnara language), have already closed and the songs that were once sung are silent. It's only a matter of time before the Mattanza follows.

The death of the Mattanza is attributed to the birth of purse seining of tuna in the Mediterranean. There are hundreds of boats that illegally fish. Spotter planes (to watch for tuna) have been banned but are still in use. The tuna they catch are not big enough (i.e., juveniles) to sell to the Tokyo market, so most wind up on the European sushi market for as little as $.50 a bite.

I wish that the program had included historical anecdotes, like the fact that Atlantic bluefin tuna were discarded as trash fish in the waters around Denmark until the 1930s. Or at least the fact that the bluefin crisis has been discussed for decades--most notably in Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean). Some visuals to support that bluefins were bigger in the past and extrapolations from the bluefin industry to many other fisheries globally would have also been nice.

Nevertheless, it was nice to see this quality coverage given to the bluefin fishery issue. Watch the 12-minute program here.