Go, Fish!

The other day, the Minnesota Zoo announced the birth of a baby dolphin. The zoo is soliciting $25 sponsorships to help pay for the little calf’s all-fish diet. Once she’s weaned from her mother, she’ll eat up to 20 pounds of fish a day. Where will all that fish come from? Perhaps our thriving local seafood restaurants can offer some help.

Observant Twin Citizens will have noticed that sushi restaurants are proliferating here faster than Starbucks in a strip mall. The old guard still thrives in the warehouse district’s Origami and Sakura in St. Paul. But new shops such as Nami and Sushi Tango are being conceived all the time. Today there are more than 20 sushi restaurants in the metro. Minnesota may boast many amenities and natural resources, but an ocean is not one of them. So how do oceangoing fish migrate to the land of 10,000 lakes?

Most local sushi restaurants rely on more than one wholesaler, and each wholesaler has fish sources that vary by species and season. For example, True World Foods, a Chicago concern which supplies many of the Twin Cities’ restaurants, gets its salmon from farms in Chile and Norway, its Atlantic bluefin tuna from New England in the summer and from the Mediterranean during the rest of the year, and its yellowfin tuna from the Gulf of Mexico.

Fish markets in many big cities are notorious for their links to organized crime. True World has a stranger pedigree: It’s supposedly owned by the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Indeed, the Rev. Moon is theologically obsessed with the tuna; it is a central symbol in the faith. Moon has salted his sermons with many fishy pronouncements, such as, “When the tuna bites, [the people] are instantly united as one,” and, “tuna fishing is certainly not a vacation for me; it is a war and a battle.”) When I called True World to check into the Moonies’ involvement, a company representative was reticent. “We have people of many religions working here,” she said.

If fish is to be served truly raw—never frozen—it will keep for about a week from when it is caught. But here’s the catch: According to Minnesota regulations, Atlantic bluefin, yellowfin, and bigeye tuna are the only fish that can be served genuinely raw. Other sushi cuts, including all the clams, eels, urchins, octopi, and what have you, are required to be “fresh frozen,” meaning they have been frozen for a requisite period of time—15 hours in a super cold “blast” freezer or a week in a normal freezer— and thawed for serving. These critters can be kept in a ship’s hold or a refrigerated truck for weeks.

Reassuringly, the Minneapolis Environmental Health Department reports that complaints against sushi restaurants are no higher than any other type of eateries, and the state Health Department has had no reports in recent memory of food-borne disease outbreaks due to sushi. (One local sushi restaurateur laments that when he pulls up customer records in response to a health complaint, he often finds they have “lots of tempura and beer on the bill. But people are very quick to blame sushi instead.”)

In truth, some local restaurants do a delicate dance with the health department and sneak non-tuna specialties that have avoided the oxymoronic “fresh freezing” process. On condition of anonymity, one local chef served me truly raw hotategai (scallop) that had been flown in from the Sea of Japan, and I have to say that the flesh seemed unusually sweet and tantalizing compared to its thawed cousin. On the other hand, I could not tell the difference between a bluefin tuna roll made with fresh frozen fish and one made with raw. The only way to really be sure what you’re eating is to badger your sushi chef—as long as you can convince him you’re not a health inspector.

And now the bad news: The Monterey Aquarium, which tracks fish populations around the world, reports stocks of Atlantic bluefin tuna, the most popular sushi fish in Japan and the U.S., are threatened by overfishing, and that salmon farming is degrading ocean habitats and possibly introducing parasites into wild salmon populations. Environmentalists are also concerned by the increased “penning” of tuna, where wild tuna are caught and then fattened in cages before being “harvested.” The Aquarium recommends avoiding bluefin tuna and farmed salmon to avoid depleting or damaging ocean resources. Sorry, Charlie!—Dan Gilchrist