“Hi there, I’d like to order some tuna, wild salmon, and snapper, please.”

“Great, I won’t bring you any of those, right away.”

Here’s the bottom line: If you’re eating sushi in the United States, chances are you’re not eating what you ordered. Oceana’s 2013 report showed that 74% of sushi in the US is mislabeled. Yes, you are getting screwed over by a combination of sushi shop owners, fish sellers, and fishermen. They’re making a lot of money off of it, too.

Fraudulent Fish

Oceana went around buying fish from grocery stores, restaurants, and sushi venues. By far, the worst offenders were sushi restaurants (we’ll get into some theories on why this is in the next section). Through genetic testing of the fish, they found that 18% of fish in grocery stores, 38% of fish in restaurants, and 74% of fish of sushi venues are mislabeled.

There are, after all, a lot of fish in the sea, and many of them look and taste pretty alike. Sometimes it’s a case of “one fish looks just like another fish.” Other times it’s “wow, this fish is way cheaper but I can sell it at fancier fish prices because they look and taste nearly the same!”

Even though this may be true (that they taste and look like the real thing) it can be dangerous. Putting aside the fact that you’re not getting what you think you’re paying for, certain fishes have much higher mercury levels. For example, if you’re pregnant and you think you’re getting one fish (that’s known to have lower mercury levels, and is therefore safer for your unborn baby), and you get another fish (that is known to have high mercury levels), but you didn’t know about this… well, I can imagine you’d be very upset about this. Not to mention the uncontrollable anal leakage that certain fishes can cause. Don’t worry, we’ll get into the gory details below.

Wild Salmon

Everyone knows that wild salmon is so much more delicious than farm raised salmon. Also, it has that beautiful orange color, unlike farmed salmon which is a sickly grey. But guess what? If you add canthaxanthin and astaxanthin to their food, it will turn their skin a natural wild color (this is not to say that doing this is bad or dangerous, wild salmon eat shrimp and small fishes that contain the same chemical, which gives them their color).

By putting these additives into a farmed salmon’s food, though, farmers are able to sell their salmon as “wild” salmon, because really, who’s going to know the difference? Plus, you get paid a lot more for the real deal wild salmon than the sad grey one. Chaching! $$$. The problem is, farmed salmon contains seven times the amount of PCBs, have more disease, and are prone to sea lice. They also have way less Omega 3, which I think is a reason why a lot of people eat wild salmon.

27% of wild salmon is mislabeled in this way, so things could be much worse.

Snapper

87% of snapper that got tested came back with the “not snapper” result. Odds aren’t good if you want snapper. However, if you wanted giltheaded seabream, madai, tilapia, Pacific ocean perch, widow rockfish, or yellowtail rockfish then you’re in luck, because those are the things that got substituted in instead. In case you don’t know, those aren’t “great” fish… but they are cheap! Too bad the savings isn’t passed on to you.

Red Snapper

With a “not lying” score of 7/120, red snapper comes in right after regular snapper. What kinds of things are being sold instead of red snapper? Let’s start with tilefish, which happens to be on the FDA’s “Do Not Eat” list due to high mercury. Then, we can move on to tilapia, which happens to be dirt cheap (and are then sold as red snapper, which is not as dirt cheap). Other fish you might be eating instead of red snapper are the Caribbean red snapper, crimson snapper, spotted rose snapper, Pacific ocean perch, yellowtail rockfish, giltheaded seabream, madai, and white bass. There’s a pattern here. A lot of these fish are quite cheap. Red Snapper is not so cheap.

Apparently, though, if you want red snapper you should go to Atlanta, Georgia, as it was one of the few cities that did sell real red snapper.

White Tuna

Here’s the deal. Never order white tuna. 84% of white tuna is actually escolar… and wow, let me tell you about escolar. Sure, it’s nice and oily and tasty. Also, it’s pretty low in mercury, not to mention it’s cheap. But, it also a fish that cannot metabolize the wax esters naturally found in its diet. These esters are known as gempylotoxin (that has the word toxin in it, I’ll have you know) which can cause gastrointestinal issues. “What kind of issues?” asks the proverbial reader inside this article. “Well, thank you for asking!” I reply. “Let me tell you: uncontrollable anal leakage as well as buttery, oily diarrhea!” The nickname escolar is the “ex-lax” fish, if that gives you any idea. [source]

There’s a reason why Japan and Italy have banned the importation of this fish. Other governments like Canada, Sweden, and Denmark require warning labels. That being said it is really delicious, so eat with caution. The word on the street is to stay under 6 ounces, though that’s going to vary person to person.

And More…

This isn’t anywhere near the end of the list. Chilean seabass and regular sea bass are replaced with Antarctic toothfish, which is probably too ugly of a name to call a fish you want to eat raw, so it’s sold as seabass. Then there’s Alaskan, Pacific, and Atlantic cod, which gets replaced with Asian catfish, threadfin slickhead, tilapia, and white hake. There’s more than this too, I’d recommend checking out the study yourself, though I think I’ve touched on the more popular sushi-related fish.

As you can see things aren’t what they seem. Have you ever wondered why cheap sushi restaurants are so much cheaper? You’re probably not eating what you think you’re eating.

On a side note before we move on, I’d also like to throw out an honorable mention to wasabi, which is rarely real either. Okay, now back to fish.

Who’s Fault Is This?

In the US, 84% of fish is imported. Out of all that fish, only 2% is inspected. So, who’s going to be the wiser? Companies importing fish can sell cheaper fish as more expensive fish and nobody’s going to know the difference 98% of the time.

From there, we get down the the middlemen selling the fish. Maybe they bough the fish as what they’re supposed to be. Now they can turn around and sell the fish down to the grocery stores and sushi joints as something else… Oh, you want some snapper? Here, I have some delicious and fresh tilap… err… snapper for you that I’ll sell for slightly below regular snapper prices! This deal is too good to be true!

If the fish manages to get down to the sushi chefs without being mislabeled, then it’s their turn to lie to you. 74% of sushi venue fish that was tested is mislabeled, you’ll remember, which makes me think a lot of this corruption is at the sushi-restaurant level. Grocery stores are only at 18%, probably because they’re not out to make a big profit. While this isn’t true across the board, most sushi restaurants aren’t run due to one sushi chef / shop owner’s passion for sushi. They’re there to make a profit, and sushi restaurants in the US are some of the most profitable around. I’ve always thought this, but now I’m certain. If you’re doing sushi to make a profit you’re going to stretch that profit as far as you can. How do you do that? You mislabel fish, and you mislabel a lot of it.

So that’s why sushi fish is mislabeled so much. I find it hard to believe that they don’t know better, unless they’re not buying whole fish (which is possible, I suppose). They see the money they could make by charging inflated snapper prices for tilapia and rock fish and start slicing.

What Can You Do About It?

Of course, it’s not like every sushi restaurant is bad like this. There are plenty of really good, really high quality sushi restaurants that I’m sure are giving you the real thing. Of course, if you’ve ever wondered why one sushi place costs so much more and tastes so much better, perhaps this is going to be a reason why.

Oceana has some suggestions for how to prevent yourself from getting swindled, but they’re not all that helpful. They say you should ask questions, think about the cost of the fish (if it’s cheap, it’s probably a cheap fish), or purchase the whole fish. Since we’re talking about sushi, all of those things are much more difficult. You could get to know your sushi chef and hope that you can trust him or her, but there’s only so much you can do before you either insult the chef for suggesting they may be screwing you over or just plain getting lied to.

I’ve always known that the state of sushi in America wasn’t that great, so I was sad to run into this study. I will certainly feel much more paranoid and suspicious, and I’ll never ever order white tuna again.

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Impostor Condiment

Freshly grated (right) and paste(left) wasabi by rdpeyton

A friend of mine who recently moved back to the States from Japan after ten years reported this on Twitter as her first experience of culture shock:

Shocked to find that there is no real wasabi in the US. only “wasabi” are tubes of horseradish mixed w/blue#1 & yellow#4.

It’s not quite true that there is no real wasabi in the US – you can sometimes get it in high-end sushi restaurants, and although I’ve never seen it in a grocery here, there is such a thing as American-grown real wasabi paste in tubes. But unless you’ve made a special effort and are paying extra, you can be pretty sure that real wasabi is not what you’re eating.

Of course wasabi is not the only Japanese ingredient that you can’t easily get outside of Japan. I have to grow my own shishito peppers and make a special trip across town to pay like $3.50 – seriously, that is insane – for just two of those long negi onions. But the rarity of real wasabi is totally different. Mostly, people in the US are not eating the meals that those shishito peppers would be missing from. But we’re all eating sushi.

So why did most the popular Japanese food abroad make its way around the world without this fundamental ingredient? The problem is that Japan chose a rather specialized plant to make such an important part of this dish. Wasabi requires unusual growing conditions that aren’t easy to reproduce, and are quite unlike the typical garden or farm.

The Natural and Unnatural History of Wasabi

The wasabi plant is part of the mustard family and is related to horseradish and daikon radish, other foods that have that same spicy kick. And like those two, the part you’re eating is the root, which in the case of wasabi is usually grated to a fine paste.

Wasabi is an aquatic plant, adapted to grow in cold, flowing mountain streams, and needs heavy shade – not at all the conditions of your average vegetable garden or farm field. So the best-quality cultivated wasabi grows in specially built beds with stream water flowing through them, shaded by a cloth covering or in some places, carefully spaced trees. And once you’ve got all that right, unlike your usual vegetable or herb, it takes two to four years for the root to grow to harvestable size.

Because of the difficulty of producing wasabi in this way that’s close to its natural habit of growing, the industry eventually come up with a way of producing it in more normal farm fields in wet soil. It’s cheaper this way, but everyone appears to think it’s lower quality (unless they’re a company that also produces the field-grown type and wants people to buy it.)

Of course, given that most of us can only buy the fake stuff in tubes, we can only envy people who have the luxury of arguing the relative merits of water- and field-grown wasabi. I’m in no position to be fussy, so if anyone wants to send me some fresh wasabi grown in soil, please go right ahead. I promise I will be absolutely thrilled.

History of Wasabi Growing

According to archaeologists, wild wasabi was eaten as along ago as the Jomon period (14,000 to 400 BC) for its medicinal properties (more on that later). Written records mentioning wasabi go back to the tenth century, noting its use in particular dishes starting in Buddhist temples.

But in those days wasabi was gathered from the wild. Where the history really gets interesting to me is when wasabi started to be deliberately grown. As an American, I live in a country where if something started a hundred years ago we think it’s old. So I am always amazed by those Japanese businesses which are run by like the tenth generation in the same family.

If you feel the same way, prepare to have your mind blown: the oldest wasabi farm in Japan is currently run by the 17th generation owner, in the town where wasabi is believed to have first been cultivated 400 years ago.

Monzen wasabi farm is in the village of Utogi in Shizuoka. It’s said that during the Keichou era (1596 – 1615), people in this village took some plants from a nearby mountain that had so much wild wasabi growing on it that it was called Mt Wasabi, and tried planting them near a spring called Idogashira. It worked, and the rest is history. The village has a monument to the origin of wasabi growing, which you can see a photo of here, which is the actual webpage of the 400-year-old Monzen wasabi farm.

(For those of you who feel the history of anything Japanese is incomplete without a shogun in it, there’s an anecdote for you too: Ieyasu Tokugawa, first Tokugawa Shogun, is said to have been so obsessed with wasabi that he forbade its sale outside his family. Not because he thought it was delicious, but because the leaves resembled the hollyhock leaves in the family crest. Those wacky shoguns!)

Wasabi in Traditional and Not-so-traditional Japanese cuisine

Fine sushi is an experience involving the freshest possible fish and appreciating the most subtle flavors. (That’s setting aside all those crazy rolls with wacky combinations of fried things and sauces and Western ingredients, about which the less said, the better.) So you might be surprised to learn the history of sushi: it actually developed from methods of preserving fish for later consumption. These methods involved fermention and sometimes actual decomposition. You can read a bit about it here (as long as you’re not actually eating while you read this, or else have a really strong stomach for, say, a description of fish surrounded by salted rice which after three months has “broken down into a kind of paste.” Yum!)

So the reason sushi rice is mixed with vinegar wasn’t originally for flavor, but because vinegar is a preservative. And wasabi kills bacteria, so before refrigeration it was probably a good thing to throw in for reasons aside from that entertaining tasty burn.

The root isn’t the only part of the wasabi plant that is eaten. In the spring it’s traditional to eat what are called sansai or mountain vegetables. These include young bamboo shoots, fiddlehead ferns, and the young leaves of the wasabi plant. I’ve read that they mildly taste of wasabi, although unfortunately I have never had the pleasure personally.

Something as awesome as wasabi can’t be constrained by tradition, though, so now you can find all kinds of imaginative innovations, even in desserts. In Japan I’ve seen wasabi ice cream (no, I didn’t try it) and eaten wasabi Kit Kat (white chocolate with a mild afterburn, and much better than it sounds). American companies have gotten into the game also: anyone want a wasabi candy cane or some wasabi gumballs? Um, yeah, no, me neither.

Wasabi Science

Wasabi is traditionally believed to have medicinal benefits, and modern science has confirmed some of these beliefs and discovered new possibilities as well. Aside from its antimicrobial powers, there’s research suggesting that it has anti-inflammatory properties and may have effects on various types of cancer . This research doesn’t seem to be at a state where you should be running out and consuming mass quantities of wasabi to cure anything, but if the potential health benefits would give you a little push to pay extra to try the fresh wasabi next time you’re at your local fancy sushi place, go for it.

Japanese wasabi science isn’t confined to medical uses, though. A team of researchers came up with a wasabi alarm that could be used to awaken deaf people in case of a fire or other emergency. They showed that canned wasabi extract sprayed into the air would wake up test subjects in less than two minutes.

In 2011, this research won the IgNobel Prize in Chemistry., which is awarded to “achievements that first make people laugh, and then makes them think.” The scientific team’s fellow awardees included researchers who proved that yawning wasn’t contagious in tortoises and and others that investigated how a person’s decision-making was affected when they had to pee really bad.

Wasabi around the world

Although the rest of the world is still more familiar with that artificially-colored paste in the tube, we can be encouraged by the fact that growers in other countries have stepped up to meet the challenge of growing wasabi away from its home turf.

In the US, one company started growing it in Oregon in the mid-1990s. The Pacific Northwest, with its cool climate, seems to be the main place to go if you want to start a North American wasabi farm – there’s also another company with growers in British Columbia, Michigan, Washington and Oregon. There’s even a company that will sell you plants, if you want to try it yourself.

Wasabi is also being grown in New Zealand, and the first wasabi farm in Europe started doing business a couple of years ago in England.

Of all of these places, first prize for overseas wasabi lovers has to go to British Columbia, where the Vancouver Canadians minor league baseball team has the three mascots pictures above: Ms BC Roll, Mr Kappa Maki, and most important: Chef Wasabi.

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Sources:

• http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/topics/japanese-traditional-foods/vol.-18-wasabi
• http://www.sbfoods-worldwide.com/foodCulture/wasabi/secret.html
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2001/05/13/general/just-what-the-herbologist-ordered/#.Up9s6VHFksw
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/04/22/food/the-unmistakable-taste-of-a-new-season/#.Up9tJVHFksw

Recently, a group of Japanese were recognized for their outstanding work in the field of strange inventions. The infamous Ig Nobel Prize awarded these Japanese inventors for their work on a smoke detector that spews wasabi.

What Is The Ig Nobel Prize?

The Ig Nobel Prize is an annual prize awarded to inventions “that make people laugh then make them think.” These are inventions that won’t necessarily change the world as we know it or cure cancer, but are interesting in their own right in the ways they solve specific, niche problems. In short: this award was basically something created for wacky Japanese scientists like Dr. NakaMats.

The Prize is awarded for lots of different categories which vary from year to year including the typical Nobel Prize categories like peace, literature, and chemistry; but the Ig Nobel Prize can also award prizes for oddly specific categories like public safety, veterinary medicine, and aviation.

The Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony itself is pretty goofy. The Prizes are given away by actual Nobel Laureates, but that’s about the extent of the ceremony’s seriousness. Wacky rituals and running gags punctuate the ceremony, including barrages of paper airplanes flying at the stage and sword swallowing.

Japanese Domination

Not surprisingly, tons of previous winners have been Japanese; you could even say that the Japanese are building a dynasty of Ig Nobel Prize winners. Last year’s Japanese winners were scientists who determined that slime can be used to map out railroad tracks. 2009′s Japanese scientists discovered that kitchen garbage can be shrunk down using bacteria derived from panda poop. The list goes on.

And yes, Dr. NakaMats actually did win an Ig Nobel Prize in 2005 for photographing and analyzing every meal he’s eaten in the last 30 years, a contribution to modern nutrition that won’t soon be forgotten.

The Wasabi Smoke Detector

The Wasabi Smoke Detector won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry. So what makes this particular invention so great? Not only was it an achievement for the scientists to get the wasabi to the right consistency to be sprayed out from the smoke detector, but the invention has uses you might not have thought about: it’s a fantastic solution for deaf people who wouldn’t be able to hear a typical fire alarm.

One of the scientists who worked on the project said this upon receiving the prize:

This prize is a gift from the subjects who slept in the examination room and had been choked with [the] pungent smell [that caused] tears and coughing. I do appreciate their courage and cooperation.

P.S. Got ideas for other scented fire alarms? Tell me on Facebook.
P.P.S. Yearn for other wasabi-powered inventions? Let me know on Twitter

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