Bluefin Tuna

There is a petition over at Change.org to get Nobu to stop serving bluefin tuna, and I encourage everyone to sign.  If you missed the amazing New York Times article about bluefin by Paul Greenberg, I also strongly recommend it. 

In between my years playing classical viola and becoming an attorney, I worked in a high-end sushi restaurant in Miami Beach, south of Fifth Street.  Our chef's connections meant we always got the best fish in town, including the best tuna.  Depending on what was available fresh, we offered either yellowtail or bigeye, both wild, which arrived at the restaurant as halves or quarters of gigantic whole fish, and were broken down with amazing efficiency.  It was wonderful to sample the tuna which arrived biweekly from different alleged locations, usually somewhere off the coast of South America.  When I became manager, I always looked forward to a pre-shift breakfast of miso soup, brown rice, scallions, and as much fresh tuna as I could hold, straight from the carcass in the process of being butchered.  After all, I had to be able to describe it to the customers, and each week the flesh held subtle differences, perhaps based on its diet, the temperature of the water, or the maturity of the fish.  I became a tuna fanatic - an evangelist, almost.

In those days of the Miami real estate boom, the best-seller was always bluefin toro (the fatty belly of the tuna), which we sold for around $12 per piece, usually the highest-priced single piece of fish on the menu.  We only offered bluefin toro - no maguro (red tuna), and hence it didn't come in to the restaurant like the other tuna.  Instead, it was shipped to us as rock-hard, blast-frozen ingots, and was farm-raised in the Mediterranean, which meant you could taste the difference between it and a wild fish.  The few times we were able to get a hold of some wild bluefin, it was entirely different than the farm-raised stuff - for a tuna aficionado like me, a sublime experience.

Back to the petition.  The petition reads, in reference to Nobu's refusal to stop selling bluefin:

"Their excuse? That Bluefin is part of a cultural heritage of sushi and they cannot simply stop serving it.  Trouble is, it’s not true. Bluefin is a relatively new addition to the menu, and its red meat was in fact despised by sushi elite in the days before refrigeration."
 
This seems a bit like sour grapes to me, and here is where I part ways with the authors.  But for the environmental impact, I would happily eat bluefin tuna every day.  What it comes down to is, you can't succeed in getting people to stop eating something delicious by telling them it is not delicious, and this is a major problem for advocates of sustainable food.  I'm the first one to say that local organic produce objectively tastes far better than stuff that was sprayed with pesticides, picked before it was ripe so it could be shelf-stable for longer, and trucked in from parts unknown.  But you run into problems when you start saying that everything marked "Avoid" on, say, the Seafood Watch List, is undesirable, I think you start losing credibility in general.

After all, isn't the idea of promoting sustainable food both about choosing sustainable options, but also avoiding unsustainable ones?  We are doing great on the former, but I think we need some work on the latter.