Will that be farmed or wild?

I know a guy in Vancouver who is an experienced Japanese chef. He's also an auto mechanic, which strikes me as a an admirable hedging of bets, especially in today's economy: even if people stop buying sushi, they still need their brakes fixed.

I asked this very knowledgeable guy about preparing fish in a sushi restaurant, and he told me, "If we get it in the round (whole fish), the guts are a dead giveaway. Yellowtail especially, the guts are wrapped in fat. Even without tasting it, I know it's farmed."

Now, I doubt I could tell the difference between farmed and wild yellowtail by taste alone, but I do know that your chances of finding wild yellowtail on the sushi menu are slim. I took the picture of the guy shopping (above) in Tokyo last fall, and I made notes on the labels in the display case: the yellowtail was all farmed.

In The End of the River, I talk about the proliferation of fish farming in Japan, but it's really a global phenomenon. Here's a startling number: half of the fish consumed worldwide now comes from a farm. If you want to go farther into this subject, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) now tells us that, in the next decades, fish farmers are going to have trouble keeping up with demand.

As I said in an earlier post, statistics can be awfully interesting.