The Toxic Saga of the Tsukiji Fish Market
eater.com
eater.com
The cause is simple enough: graft and corruption on all levels and at a massive scale, exposed in large part by Yuriko Koike (the relatively new governor of Tokyo).
Now it's 2017 and the airport still isn't ready... Maybe 2019?
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/e...
s/fishmongers/programmers/g
"It’s also fairly obvious that the programmers weren’t widely consulted during the office remodeling process. The shiny new office for the programmers is an open space in an attempt to be a more collaborative environment, but the design deeply limits the ability to focus of the programmers, especially when working on the complex pieces of code. (In one twitter periscope stream about the new space, a programmer live tweeted just how difficult it is to go about his business of coding as his focus was repeatedly broken and/or his attention was repeatedly called for by the multitude of other people's happenings in the wide open space of the office around him.)
We're not running out of chicken, but we are running out of fish.
To say that we are running out of fish (generally) is problematic since there is overpopulation problems in lakes near where I live. The problem is that the fish isn't the kind that people want to buy, so fishermen goes where the money is.
i think it was Cousteau who said that farming carnivorous fish like salmon was just a terrible idea. it requires a really high ratio of fish meal protein to salmon protein, something like 6 to 1.
we'd be better off farming more fish that behave like Tilapia. they can eat their own excrement.
Did you really create a new account to make that comment? What's the motivation there?
If Tilapia arent feeded, they will eat algae and smaller Tilapia. Small tilapia fry can survive eating microbes and algae that grow in organic residues for a while, but this is a different question. Giving cattle the minimum to just survive is not the same as farming cattle.
On the other hand, Tilapia needs proteins. Few animals can trive eating just its own discarding products, void for definition of anything that would merit to be recicled by the fish metabolism.
If their fish (or cattle, or poultry) is so hungry that start to eat their own excrement, they are just making a very poor product, and scamming their customers.
Note: Basa is a type of catfish that can grow well despite dirty water.
i've heard that wild sockeye salmon eat a lot of insects and therefore wind up with lower levels of mercury than, say, tuna. farmed salmons is not sockeye.
Here's a list of North American fisheries, some of which are well managed: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/statusoffisheries/2011/second/Q...
But the basic principle is the same: private property rights can help mitigate these problems.
The optimum strategy for small land ownership is often maximum exploitation. In the case of the ocean fishing people would fish as much as possible, and just wait for more fish to wonder back.
That is, private owners in this case are able to socialise the cost of their operation, which is no more private ownership than when the profits are socialised.
What a cringe-worthy sentence that is. Also what a load of crap that sentence is. I'm guessing the writer has never actually been. Tsukiji is a wholesale fish market. Its smelly, cold and wet with lots of flash frozen fish sitting on warehouse pallets. Just like what you would expect a wholesale fish market to be. It just happens to be in Tokyo.
I am curious how many other fish markets have you been to?
Mexico City and New York City have similar scale fish markets with just as many varieties and with just as much commerce. I'm guessing someone like Anthony Bourdain or some other TV food celebrity put Tsukiji on the tourist map and so now people feel compelled to see something special in it.
And I honestly can't understand why anyone would get up before dawn to go to a 5:30AM fish auction if they didn't work in the business and understood Japanese.
You know why. Hipsters do it for bragging rights.
Better to go around 11 right after the tourist rush.
As someone who is passionate about food, cooking and in particular, japanese cuisine - going to Tsukiji was really an amazing experience.
Learning first hand from a wholesaler about the daily process of acquiring stock which they go on to sell was fascinating. It's really astounding that people are going there every morning and inspecting ~1000 tuna for a mere few seconds, inspecting only by colour and occasionally the fattiness of the tissue in their fingers. These split second assessments then lead to them making a ballpark valuation of the stock which they take with them to auction - the decisions affecting their livelihood.
If you have had the opportunity to sample sushi from across the spectrum of quality - you'll know full well that there is good sushi and bad sushi. Considering sushi is something like 7 ingredients (rice, mirin, soy sauce, sugar, fish, vinegar, wasabi) the execution of the dish and the quality of the ingredients are absolutely key. Being able to go to the heart of where everything begins is really quite exciting.
I eat sushi often, and I have been to good and bad places alike. But as a sushi amateur, I don't really grasp the passion of Japanese for tuna - it's not even a fish they used to have in the first place in Japan, most of it is not fresh and is just imported from the Mediterranean, and to my tongue tuna (and I tried about every part of it) is nothing I crave for. I enjoy a LOT more the local fishes they have in Japan. Again, it's probably just me, but I find tuna utterly boring in mouth.
> the decisions affecting their livelihood.
Not really. Plenty of bad sushi joints stay afloat for years and do not lack customers. I have even eaten at famous places near Tsukiji and I have found it to be OK, but nothing at a spectacular level despite their reputation.
>Not really. Plenty of bad sushi joints stay afloat for years and do not lack customers. I have even eaten at famous places near Tsukiji and I have found it to be OK, but nothing at a spectacular level despite their reputation.
I'm not convinced your observation is really a valid response to what you've highlighted. If your professional reputation revolved around buying and wholesaling tuna, it naturally follows that your livelihood depends on the decisions you make when you buy your stock. Maybe when you make a bad purchase you can recoup some of the losses by selling to one of the bad sushi joints that you mention, but you have still lost time and probably margin. You may have also disappointed customers who may have been depending on your usual quality stock. So for me, having any first hand insight into the nuance of another person's way of life in interesting and made the visit to Tsukiji a worthwhile experience.
Getting up once late at night is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, even if only to cross off a (hypothetically bad) experience.
On my visits, I roamed around for hours, entirely unmolested, just keeping an eye out for the funny little electric carts driving everywhere which threaten to mow down unsuspecting tourists.
I'm not sure that the trade in endangered species is anything to get excited about.
update: And for some reason I get downvoted for denouncing something that is against our best interest... whales regulate the oceanic carbon cycle. You kill them and contribute to ocean acidification.
[0]: Another case is Quinoa which used to be a staple food for poor Bolivians who have now been outpriced by the demand (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans...)
On that note, much of the whale I've seen, bought, and eaten in Japan has come from Iceland. Norway also seems to kill more whales than Japan does, yet the whaling in Europe is completely ignored. Japan's "otherness" makes it easy to target them, and it's obvious since I see the whaling issue frequently come up even when it's not related to the topic at all aside from "Japan" or "fishing" being mentioned.
I expect the market will slowly collapse as the Japanese who grew up eating it in school slowly die out. Most people my age had never even eaten it.
Try finding anyone in the UK under 60 willing to eat tripe or jellied eels.
I believe some traditional crafts use some kind of whale whiskers, but I wouldn't imagine that is that big a factor.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35397749
Reads like something from the darker portions of a Douglas Adams novel, but I find it entirely plausible.
I downvoted you for complaining about, or questioning, your downvotes.
Don't do that.
"We estimate that rebuilding whale populations would remove 1.6×10^5 tons of carbon each year through sinking whale carcasses." [1]
"these changes are small relative to the total ocean carbon sink" [1]
The total ocean carbon sink is 10^9 tons of carbon each year [2]. So the changes in whale populations have had a 0.016% influence on the ocean carbon sink. So, not much.
But in the future when different geoengineering methods are suggested, maybe their impact in terms of tons of carbon per year could be compared to the size of this effect of stopping whaling altogether.
[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
The obvious counter is that even at pre-human population levels the whales are an insignificant fraction of the shallow ocean biomass, and that artificial algea blooms over deep water could easily replace this carbon transfer in a sustainable way.
Perhaps more interesting is that the lack of whale falls has probably already driven to extinction many of the deep water species that prey on the drop sites. Those that are left are at risk. And at least until we can catalog the genetic diversity of these ecosystems, that could be a tremendous loss. There may be biological processes adapted there that are useful to us, in bio-engineering or medicine.
*citation needed