New Type of Tuna

My final event in L.A. was an unusual book talk and tuna tasting at a new restaurant in Beverly Hills called Hokusai. Hokusai is one of the first restaurants in the U.S. certified to serve new type of tuna called “Kindai Tuna.” These are bluefin tuna that have been farmed from start to finish, from egg to fattened fish. They’re called Kindai Tuna because they’re the result of several decades of high-tech research by the Fisheries Laboratory of Kinki University in western Japan (“Kindai” is a contraction of the university’s name in Japanese, “Kinki Daigaku”).

This is a big deal, because all of the other “farmed tuna” out there are not, actually, farmed at all—they’re ranched. As I describe in The Zen of Fish, tuna ranching does nothing to take the pressure off wild fish stocks; in fact, it probably increases the pressure on wild fish. Tuna ranchers catch young bluefin from the wild, corral them into pens, and fatten them for slaughter. Ranching takes the guesswork and seasonal variability out of the business. Tuna ranchers have become fantastically rich off this system. (Read more.)

By contrast, the Kinki University fisheries biologists have done the hard work of learning to grow bluefin tuna from eggs; theoretically, this is a more sustainable approach that could help reduce the overfishing of bluefin by ranchers and regular fishermen. But it’s also very difficult to do, because bluefin are notoriously hard to raise. (At the end of this blog entry, I’ve appended a New York Times article on the challenges faced by the Kinki University bluefin project.)

Moreover, many fish-farming operations around the world have created new health and environmental problems that negate any benefits that might accrue to the stocks of wild fish (I touch on of some of these issues in The Zen of Fish and elsewhere on my blog). The Kinki University project intends to raise bluefin in a way that is both good for the environment and good for our health. We’ll see whether they can succeed in meeting these lofty goals.

So, to get back to my event at Hokusai restaurant, I shared the stage with Nick Sakagami, one of the top independent tuna distributors in the U.S. for the sushi market. Nick (in the gray suit) also works with Kinki University as the sole U.S. distributor of Kinda Tuna. The timing was remarkable, because just the day before, the New York Times had run a front-page story on the global dearth of bluefin tuna for sushi; Nick had brought several copies of the article with him to prove his points about the need for farmed bluefin.

Our audience at Hokusai was an extremely impressive group of 50 women belonging to the Step Up Women’s Network, who had signed up for an evening of sake sipping, tuna tasting, and sushi edutainment provided by Nick and me.

Since it was a women’s group, I focussed my presentation on the issues of gender discrimination in the sushi world that are part of the story in The Zen of Fish, and I told them about the main character in the book, Kate Murray, who succeeds against all odds in becoming a Caucasian female sushi chef. Then I quickly touched on some of my “How to Eat Sushi” tips, including the question of how to make environmentally friendly choices at the sushi bar, which is also part of the story in the book.

That led directly into Nick’s presentation on Kindai Tuna. He had three different cuts of Kinda Tuna on hand—akami (red meat), chu-toro (medium fatty), and toro (fatty). The women received platters with one slice of each type to taste.

The only disappointment of the evening was that I had to leave early to catch a plane to San Francisco. I can’t tell you how hard it was for me to leave a room full of 50 accomplished and attractive women.

Here’s the New York Times article on Kindai Tuna:

FARMING BLUEFIN TUNA, THROUGH THICK STOCKS AND THIN

New York Times

By Norimitsu Onishi

September 26, 2006

In the dark green waters off the coast of western Japan here, scores of 150-pound bluefin tuna glided counterclockwise inside a pen 100 feet in diameter, the telltale blue streaks on their bodies shimmering just below the surface.

The fish, though, were not just any kind of bluefin tuna, whose fatty flesh is the most prized delicacy at exclusive sushi restaurants in Japan and has set off fishing wars in the world's oceans. They represented the holy grail of fish breeding: bluefin tuna born and raised in captivity.

They were also the lifework of the man shoveling mackerel into the pen from the edge of a boat one recent afternoon, Hidemi Kumai, 71, the head of the fisheries laboratory at Kinki University. Mr. Kumai had spent more than three decades trying to farm the bluefin tuna -- an unusually delicate fish, both physically and psychologically, prone to everything from restlessness to cannibalism -- before succeeding in 2002. Two years later, he began sending it off to sushi counters in Osaka and Tokyo.

''I felt as if I were giving away my daughters in marriage,'' Mr. Kumai said.

When he undertook his quest in 1970, tuna were plentiful in Japanese waters and the Japanese were really the only people interested in eating slices of raw fish. Today, even as the popularity of sushi keeps increasing worldwide, overfishing and pollution have pushed down edible fish stocks.

The competition has become fiercest over the bluefin tuna, which fetches about $110 a pound at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the world's biggest. Of the five kinds of tuna eaten in Japan, bluefin accounts for less than 2 percent. But fishermen from New Zealand to Libya comb seas for it; in Croatia, Spain and elsewhere, young bluefin tuna are caught and fattened inside giant underwater cages before being shipped here.

Despite international quotas, the appetite for bluefin tuna is so insatiable that in the Mediterranean it is on the verge of extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund. To curb quota violations and what the industry calls tuna laundering, Japanese officials have started carrying out DNA tests on imported bluefin tuna.

The Japanese, who eat about 80 percent of the world's bluefin tuna, are now contending with competition from, predictably, the Chinese. As Chinese in Beijing and Shanghai become sushi devotees, they are paying top dollar for bluefin. Some of the best sushi restaurants in Japan are grumbling that bluefin has become too expensive and hard to buy -- and that they might scratch tuna from their menus instead of suffering the indignity of serving the cheap stuff.

There is a ''high possibility,'' Mr. Kumai said, that in a decade or two, as China keeps getting richer, Japan may simply be priced out of a shrinking bluefin market.

''Now only Chinese in the coastal areas are eating sushi, or can afford to,'' Mr. Kumai said. ''What happens when the Chinese in the vast hinterland start eating sushi?''

As part of Japan's national interest, and also because the Japanese have been exhausting the world's tuna stocks, Mr. Kumai advocated the large-scale farming of bluefin tuna, led by the government.

''This has to be a national project,'' he said. ''Now Americans and Chinese are eating sushi, so we can't just sit back.''

The outside threat has added urgency to Mr. Kumai's work, one that he had never imagined when he began fish farming in the late 1950's. As a boy growing up in the landlocked prefecture of Nagano, he had longed to see the ocean, but World War II restricted travel. When he finally caught a glimpse of the ocean during a junior high school trip, he was hooked.

Over the years, the university's Fisheries Laboratory was first in the captive breeding of about 20 fish species, including halibut, flat bream and Japanese amberjack. Much of the work went on here, in the placid Pacific waters between the town of Kushimoto and the small island of Oshima, where various fish are farmed inside pens.

But bluefin are the main attraction. At first, capturing young bluefin in the wild and transporting them into pens proved difficult, with most of them dying in fishermen's nets. Bluefin bruise easily because of their delicate scales, and their gills take in little oxygen compared to other fish, so they have to swim continuously to breathe -- even while asleep.

Cooped up, many died quickly. Eventually, Mr. Kumai learned how to keep them alive and scored a first in 1979 when the fish spawned inside a pen. Still, after hatching, the fry died after a few weeks -- a cycle that went on until 1982, when the fish inexplicably stopped spawning.

They resumed in 1994, but new problems arose. The fry survived, but the bigger ones kept gobbling up their little brethren. ''Other fish, the sea bream or flatfish, do that, too,'' Mr. Kumai said. ''But tuna are very aggressive. The population could shrink to a third overnight.''

Mr. Kumai scooped the fry into bowls -- their delicate bodies would chafe at nets -- and segregated them by size. Unlike other species, they quickly grew tails but lagged behind in developing other fins -- so that they could advance but not turn.

''They kept crashing into nets and dying,'' Mr. Kumai said with a grave face. ''We took X-rays and found their necks were broken.''

For fish that can grow to be as large as 1,800 pounds, they are also unusually sensitive. Fireworks, even the headlight of a car, can cause them to panic, crash into nets and break their necks.

Nevertheless, many survived and spawned eggs. In 2002, these eggs hatched and the fry survived. By segregating the fry from the larger fish, raising them in bigger pens and adjusting the water temperature and their diet through trial-and-error experiments over the years, he was able to raise them to adulthood. In 2004, these fully farmed bluefin tuna were sold to an expectant nation.

''I've never met anyone who told me it tastes bad, though I know it's hard to say that to my face,'' said Mr. Kumai, who said he had never eaten wild bluefin.

Some sushi chefs here in Kushimoto sniff at the ranched bluefin, saying it yields a fatty meat that does not taste as good as the wild variety. Wild bluefin, migrating across oceans, tend to be lean. But Mr. Kumai's couch potatoes are 10 percent lean and 90 percent fatty.

Because of decreasing stocks, Mr. Kumai's bluefin is now sold only once a month at a Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo -- for a third less than the wild kind. That fact annoyed Mr. Kumai.

''Just because it's farmed, the prices are automatically lower,'' he said. ''If it's good, it's good. There shouldn't be a difference.''

Friday, June 29, 2007