Around the corner from my office in New York stands a string of sushi restaurants. At lunchtime most days they are packed with professionals, gobbling down cold lumps of toro (tuna belly), hamachi (yellowfin tuna) or ebi (prawn). So far, so unremarkable. But reflect, for a minute, on all that raw fish. A generation ago, the idea of American office workers munching cheerfully on uncooked tuna would have been almost laughable. After all, the USA was the land of (cooked) steak and fries; sandwiches and hamburgers were the norm for lunch. Many Americans had only the haziest idea of what the Japanese actually ate; and there were few sushi restaurants to be found, even in cities such as New York.
Yet in just a few years, sushi has colonised urban centres with startling speed. The first wave of sushi restaurants cropped up in California in the 1970s, partly to service the estimated one million Americans of Japanese descent. But now they are ubiquitous, serving Caucasians too: teenagers take sushi to school; prisons have introduced it; in California, it is served at trucker stops. Meanwhile the National Sushi Association reports that there are now more than 5,000 sushi bars in American supermarkets, with the number continuing to rise fast.
“When I first started teaching in the mid-1980s, if I asked a class of my students if anyone had eaten sushi, a few hands might go up,” observes Theodore Bestor, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, who did his academic research in Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, and now studies food cultures. “But now all my students have eaten sushi; the attitude is: “How do you think I got to Harvard without being able to eat sushi?” Raw fish has become a symbol of modernity and sophistication; conversely, squealing “yuck” to cold tuna is profoundly uncool.
The cultural messages embedded in this shift are fascinating. If you are feeling optimistic, you might like to see the sushi invasion as a sign of globalisation – and America’s ability to act as a cultural melting pot. One of the most popular sushi dishes these days is the “California” sushi roll, which blends traditional rice with non-Japanese items such as avocado. In New York you can find “SushiSamba”, which mixes Latin American cuisine with that raw fish. But perhaps the most intriguing issue of all is the ethnicity of sushi restaurant staff. These days sushi restaurants often struggle to get “real” Japanese chefs, since there are not enough to meet the boom. So Chinese, Vietnamese or Filipino staff are used instead. The assumption, it seems, is that Asian faces are required to make the sushi restaurant look “real”; but many customers cannot really tell Chinese and Japanese apart. “Globalisation doesn’t necessarily homogenise cultural differences nor erase the salience of cultural labels. On the contrary, it grows the franchise,” observes Bestor. “The brand equity of sushi as Japanese cultural property adds to the cachet of the country and cuisine.” Even if the face is actually Chinese.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Financial Times.
