The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy | 
| Author: Sasha Issenberg
Publisher: Gotham
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 160994
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 1592402941
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.692
EAN: 9781592402946
ASIN: 1592402941
Publication Date: May 3, 2007
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Product Description
From the sea to your plate, the first international tour of sushis journey in the global marketplace
One generation ago, sushis narrow reach ensured that sports fishermen who caught tuna in most of the world sold the meat for pennies as cat food. Today, the fatty cuts of tuna known as toro are among the planets most coveted luxury foods, worth hundreds of dollars a pound and capable of losing value more quickly than any other product on earth. So how has one of the worlds most popular foods gone from being practically unknown in the U.S. to being served in towns all across America, and in such a short span of time? Sushi aficionados and newcomers alike will be surprised to learn the true history, intricate business, and international allure behind this fascinating food.
A riveting combination of culinary biography, behind-the-scenes restaurant detail, and a unique exploration of globalizations dynamics, journalist Sasha Issenberg traces sushis journey from Japanese street snack to global delicacy. THE SUSHI ECONOMY takes you through the stalls of Tokyos massive Tsukiji market, where the auctioneers sell millions of dollars of fish each day, and to the birthplace of modern sushi--in Canada. He then follows sushis evolution in America, exploring how it became LAs favorite food. Youre taken behind the sushi bar with the chef Nobu Matsuhisa, whose distinctive travels helped to define the flavors of global sushi cuisine, and with a unique sushi chef blazing a path in Texas. Issenberg also delves into the complex economics of the fish trade, following the ups and downs of the hunt for bluefin off New England, the tuna cowboys on the southern coast of Australia who invented the art of tuna ranching, and uncovering the mysterious underworld of pirates, smugglers, and the tuna black market.
Few businesses reveal the complex dynamics of globalization as acutely as the tunas journey from the sea to the sushi bar. After traversing the pages of THE SUSHI ECONOMY, youll never see the food on your plate or the world around you quite the same way again.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Excellent book about sushi but also the tuna supply chain May 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found this to be an excellent book and great/quick read. I've been passing it around to people since.
I bought the book, a day after visiting Tsukiji and it does a great job of pulling the curtain and really explaining the movement of a fish from the sea to the individual ordering a sushi. The economics and how sushi became the economic force of the tuna trade are really amazing and well described. While the book focuses heavily on Tuna, it will teach more about supply chain than most people know, and what goes for Tuna goes also for other species though to lesser extent.
Sasha Issenberg circles the globe to give you The Sushi Economy March 7, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a very compelling, informative and fun read. Author Issenberg covers 360 degrees of the sushi economy, giving you its markets (presenting the famous Tsukiji marketplace in Tokyo as the nexus of this world), buyers, consumers, fishers, ranchers, activists, restaurateurs and entrepreneurs. Locales like Tokyo, LA and New York are to be expected. What's unexpected are sushi's effect on such outposts like Austin, TX and Port Lincoln, South Australia, population 14,740 and home to the world's most successful concentration of sushi ranch-farmer entrepreneurs.
Issenberg has an economist's knowledge and understanding, but conveys the market dynamics in an approachable, lively way. Take this one passage as an example: "Instead of looking to regulate producers...Izawa had decided to insert himself within a trade network and become another broker of taste and credibility. Pirates saw each turn in the corner along global commerce's disjointed maze of borders and laws as places behind which they could hide; Izawa saw a series of checkpoints, where new gatekeepers could exercise authority. For that job, he had enlisted his countrymen not as activists but as consumers, and tapped into currents already flowing through Japanese culture. By going after foreign farms, Izawa respected the visceral fears of the island nation and indirectly flattered the Japanese idea of their country's good international citizenship."
The book is chock full of passages like that which show deep and learned understanding of markets, networks, cultures and human behavior.
From yuk to yum September 21, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Sushi has changed from yuk to yum. This book makes eating raw fish an intriguing case study of hunter-gatherer global economics.
"The Sushi Economy" traces eating raw tuna from nineteenth-century restaurants in Japan to twenty-first century ocean ranches in Australia. Small pieces of fresh raw fish were first preserved using vinegared rice. The rice, first thrown away, came to be savoured as part of the meal. This was "Edo-mae nigiri" raw tuna sushi.
Centuries later a Japan Airlines executive began flying Canadian Bluefin to Tokyo to use spare cargo space. Then an Australian fisherman began ranching tuna by herding the wild fish into ocean corrals. Now researchers are trying to raise tuna directly from fertilized eggs. Wherever tuna are found; wherever sushi is sold: entrepreneurs are innovating and communities are growing.
This book entertains and informs, leaving the reader with a wonderful example of modern economics and success.
 A fun easy to read book on sushi August 6, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book doesn't do as great of a job tying all of its points together and guide you through his thinking of how sushi became popular, but it's interesting to take all of the case studies in the book and making the connections yourself.
A Not-So-Ancient Delicacy in a Modern World Economy July 25, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
In _The Breakfast Club_ from 1985, Molly Ringwald's character brings her lunch to detention, but it isn't the typical brown bag the other kids have brought. It is a tray of sushi, and the rest of them are astonished, maybe because they have never seen such a food before. It is a scene that is now quaintly dated, even after only a couple of decades, because although a Big Mac might still be more the prevalent norm, and although sushi is still something of an exotic food, it is popular rather than mysterious. The way this came to be involves marketing, technology, and a shrinking planet, and is the story of _The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy_ (Gotham Books) by Sasha Issenberg. Sushi is based on raw fish, mostly tuna, but it isn't really fresh and it decidedly is not simple. This is not a book that will make you wince or feel guilty over your next tuna roll, and it may even beat the drums for globalization. We do have, even in small towns, the capacity now to enjoy this tasty delicacy, and as Issenberg writes, "In few places are the complex dynamics of globalization revealed as visibly as in the tuna's journey from the sea to the sushi bar."
The sushi story is the story of tuna, and Issenberg follows the fish backward from market to its origin in the sea. The main market is the Tsukiji which takes up 57 acres in Tokyo, where a few hundred buyers gather to take a look at tuna brought in from all over the world. This is a huge market of $6 billion a year, and one fish alone might routinely go for $30,000. The great change in the market came starting in 1972 when there was a first Tokyo auction of Canadian bluefin tuna, brought by plane from a region where the fish were considered worthless. The tuna, rice, and seaweed delicacy with which we are familiar, Issenberg says, "served by a sushi chef to a customer seated before him - is in fact no older than the California roll," which was itself an American invention of the 1960s. "Sushi had started as a form of preservation," Issenberg writes, "but it was becoming precisely the opposite: a way of using the infrastructure of modernity to chaperone a delicate dish around the world." This has resulted in overfishing, and attempts to farm tuna, "moving the ocean's biggest, fastest, toughest fish into a cage and keeping it there for months or years." Of course aficionados sniff at the quality of farmed tuna meat, but that doesn't matter to those who, say, like a cheap tray of tasty sushi from the supermarket.
There are wonderful profiles in this book, like the Caucasian tuna chef who successfully brought sushi to Austin, Texas, or the self-appointed sheriff of Libyan tuna poaching who uses Google maps to monitor illegal fishing, or the disciples of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon who entered the market in Gloucester, Massachusetts, or the champion tuna tosser at the Port Lincoln Tunarama Festival, or the star of _Iron Chef_ who is opening a sushi restaurant in Mumbai, or many more. Each profile shows how global an enterprise sushi is. Issenberg reflects: "To eat sushi is to display an access to advanced trade networks, of full engagement in world commerce." Sushi is now so prevalent as to be taken for granted; it is good to be reminded of how complex and how modern a story it really is.
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