Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Americans ordered more than 230 million servings of sushi in 2010, a five-percent jump from
2009. But the industry may be growing too fast for the fish to keep up. Many of the
more popular species are nearing extinction after years of being overfished. If we continue
fishing the way we do they're not going to have any fish to serve in the restaurant,
you know, in the next 10, 15, 20 years. There you go. Fish is our livelihood and unless
we take care of our waters we will all be out of business, you know. We need to make
a change. That change was a new way of making sushi, a sustainable one that didn't use some
of the most popular kinds of fish that have been over-caught and placed on the avoid list
of Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Food Watch Guide. We were going to open a sushi restaurant that
took the top five sellers and said we're not serving any of this. They thought we were
nuts. Eel, hamachi, yellowfin and big-eyed tunas are several traditional staples missing
from the menu at Tataki in Pacific Heights. The restaurant was the first of what is now
nine sustainable sushi bars in North America. At the end of the day we're all going to be
serving sustainable sushi, eventually. The question is do we do it now and then allow
stocks to build back or do we just wipe them all out now and then we're all serving sustainable
stocks at the end because there's nothing else. It's just jellyfish sushi for everyone.
The challenge facing sustainable sushi bars is how to satisfy customers' cravings without
using the fish they know and love. Here at Kai chefs are doing that by taking a unique
twist on the typical sushi ingredients, like these California rolls that are topped off
with a little bit of California cherries and instead of king crab, which is on the avoid
list, they use halibut straight from Oyster Point. The problem is because people have
never really been able to experience it they don't ask for it, and if they don't ask for
it the chef doesn't serve it, and it's a vicious cycle that keeps us on this path. A path of
extinction for many fish species and for the nearly half-a-billion-dollar a year sushi
industry. For the Hearst Foundation, I'm Garrett Tenney, City by the Bay.