Save the Planet or Eat Toro?

Earlier this year, I decided to eliminate seafood from my diet . I had already stopped eating meat from farm animals for the last two years, and giving up fish seemed to be the next logical progression.

My parents were perplexed when I told them.

"Fish aren't really animals," my mother scoffed to me. "They actually want to be eaten by people."

This, of course, is coming from someone who grew up in a country where whale hunting is still going on in spite of international pressure to stop this traditional practice. When I was working abroad in Japan, I saw the whale sashimi and whale jerky being sold at the local supermarket, along with whale meat bento boxes proudly displayed at a big train station stop along the southern tip of the Chiba prefecture.

If Shamu and Moby Dick aren't lovable enough to be saved from human consumption in Japan, imagine what that spells for the rest of the underwater animalia kingdom.

I consciously delayed my no-seafood policy until after I moved back from Japan. I decided that while eliminating meat from your diet may be a tolerable quirk in this country, the complete exclusion of seafood from your diet feels like giving a middle finger to the very pillar of Japanese society.

I know this because I grew up with this. I can't think of another nationality that eats their fish with such religious fervor as the Japanese do. Before our fish is consumed with our taste buds, we supposedly take them in with our eyes - as works of art that complete the delicate symphony of taste, color and composition.

Our fish is more than our lifeblood. Our fish operates on a higher plane of aesthetics.

This principle is more apparent when you enter the world of sushi. In my very brief stint as a sushi waitress in Los Angeles, our bald and cranky sushi chef yelled at us anytime we set the sushi platter before our customers the wrong way. Getting this wrong was worse than hanging a Monet painting upside down.

Never mind that most of the customers probably couldn't care less. In accordance with tradition, the specific arrangement of the sashimi had to open before the patron like a floral arrangement, with the wasabi and ginger dabs always on the right side of the plate.

"It's shameful when we get it wrong," the sushi chef snapped at me in Japanese when I messed it up a second, third time. There are few cultural offenses worse in Japan than the gross mishandling of sushi.

As many of you know, the popularity of sushi has exploded exponentially on a global scale. In the days before the term "globalization" was on everybody's lips, sushi used to be a weird delicacy, the gross-out foreign food that was up there with duck embryos and monkey brains. Now sushi is everywhere, and even the landlocked folk on the other side of the world just can't get enough of it.

Which is good for the farmer in Idaho who gets a weekly hankering for toro. Which is bad for our planet at large.

Our bluefin tuna population is now only 10 percent of the population than it was at in 1960. Just last month, conservation group WWF announced that unless we dramatically curve our overfishing, the entire species may be wiped out in three years.

Of course, the question of whether Japan can give up its sushi is a microcosmic example of the greater rhetorical question that all of us face, regardless of where we live or what we eat.

Can America give up its dependence on foreign oil? Can developed nations give up their out-of-bounds material consumption of stuff? Can we give up our own apathy, our individual indifference to the dire state of our one and only planet?

These questions won't be rhetorical forever. Sooner or later, we're all bound to find out.

Originally published in Pacific Citizen May 1, 2009