Super Eco

Photo credit: ButterflySha, flickr

Hey, what's that between your chopsticks? Put down that wasabi and back away from the sushi. Slowly. Because chances are that no matter how delicious it is, you're eating one of the Toxic Five Enemies to sustainable sushi.

Sustainable ... wha'?

Sustainable sushi. You probably didn't think much about where that salmon came from or that bluefin tuna or ohhh, the shrimp. But if restaurants and the people who eat in them (let's start with the 2.5 million sushi meals served to Americans in 2007) don't start making some big changes, there won't be any sushi left to eat.

Take salmon. Wildcaught salmon, though eco-friendly, is expensive. So it's likely you're not eating it, not on that $9 sushi dinner special, anyway. And farmed salmon ... well, let's compare it to factory farms of all sorts. You get the idea. Packed like sardines in dirty water, eating and eating and eating. Same thing with hamachi.

Then there's shrimp. Scooped from the bottom of the ocean, catching wild shrimp is a little (okay, a lot) like clearcutting the rainforest. And farming them just destroys acres of ecologically fragile mangrove forests.

Like eel? Unagi is caught young, penned up and then fattened on huge quantities of wild fish.

So what to do? Well, turns out there are other fish in the sea. Literally. And a bait-and-switch practice may just save what's left of the Toxic Five sushi species. So set your taste buds for arctic char, sustainably-caught yellowfin tuna, and eco-trawled wild shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico. And consider taking along Blue Ocean's downloadable sushi guide [PDF] or one of these ways to ID safe fish next time you get a hankering to swirl some wasabi into your shoyu.