Apply informed consent norms to the diner-sushi chef relationship

New York Times:

What we need isn’t more tuna, but a renaissance in American sushi; to discover for ourselves — and perhaps to remind the Japanese — what sushi is all about. A trip to the neighborhood sushi bar should be a social exchange that celebrates, with a sense of balance and moderation, the wondrous variety of the sea.

I suggest that customers refuse to sit at a table or look at a menu. We should sit at the bar and ask the chef questions about everything — what he wants to make us and how we should eat it. We should agree to turn our backs on our American addictions to tuna (for starters, try mackerel), globs of fake wasabi (let the chef add the appropriate amount), gallons of soy sauce (let the chef season the sushi if it needs seasoning) and chopsticks (use your fingers so the chef can pack the sushi loosely, as he would in Japan). Diners will be amazed at how following these simple rules can make a sushi chef your friend, and take you on new adventures in taste.

This will be a bit tricky for those of us limited to kosher fish...

Raw fish and the meaning of life

From The New York Times Book Review: Sushi Books by Trevor Corson and Sasha Issenberg

But the global sushi trade, as Issenberg portrays it, is a curiously old-fashioned market subject to the vagaries of nature and a complex network of personal relationships. “It is one of the last areas in which human beings remain hunter-gatherers.” Issenberg takes this argument pretty far. “Through sushi, we see that ... integrity does not need to come only from defending the tribal honor of terroir, but is to be uncovered in movement, as well. Conquering distance, geographical and cultural, can be a triumph of the liberal values of mobility and interdependence, empowering local communities instead of threatening them.”...

If the consumption of sushi is, as Issenberg proposes, a key indicator of modernization, a signifier of participation in the globalized economy, then it’s only a matter of time before China and India become major markets for bluefin tuna. “To eat sushi,” he writes, “is to display an access to advanced trade networks, of full engagement in world commerce.” The “Iron Chef” star Masaharu Morimoto is opening a place in Mumbai. When people start eating toro in Calcutta, Issenberg says, “India will make a successful claim to a Western ideal of modernity that no number of outsourced call centers can.”