Go Fish

I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.

I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.

I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.

Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.

Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.

The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.

Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.

This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.

Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.

On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.

Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.

Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.

Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.

“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.

“That’s Sarah.”

“Who?”

“Sarah.”

“Which one’s Sarah?”

“They’re all Sarah.”

“?”

“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”

“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.

Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.

by Grace Glass, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Fishman, Plastic Trapped Love (Interpretive Hexagon), detail. 2025
[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]

Fish, Family, Freedom

Alaska’s Senate Race Could Be Decided by Salmon

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Alaska’s Senate race, a close contest between the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, and the former congresswoman Mary Peltola, is that salmon are pretty amazing fish. There’s the swimming upstream, the spawning, and the dying. Bears love salmon. Orcas love salmon. People love salmon. Without salmon, the first Alaskans, crossing the Bering land bridge some fifteen thousand years ago, could not have survived. On a recent trip to Alaska, I was, at various points, fed salmon for dinner, offered salmon as a gift, and given salmon for barter. Directly or indirectly, salmon feeds almost everything in the state, including its politics. Alaska’s bid for statehood, in the late nineteen-fifties, was in part a matter of keeping the hands of Seattle businessmen off local salmon stocks. Business deals are hammered out at fishing retreats. In 2010, a seaplane carrying Ted Stevens, likely the most powerful politician ever to come out of Alaska, crashed en route to a salmon lodge near Bristol Bay. He died wearing his waders.

People in the Lower Forty-eight care a lot about Alaska’s Senate race. This cycle, it has been twice as expensive, per capita, as Michigan’s, and eight times Texas’s. The attention is unusual. In federal elections, Alaska reliably votes Republican; every time Donald Trump has been on the ballot, Alaska has voted for him by ten points or more. But, amid historically low approval ratings for the President, the Democrats are hoping to flip the seat, an essential part of any attempt to wrest back control of both houses of Congress. Trump, meanwhile, is clearly nervous about holding the seat. He recently headlined a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla, a small city north of Anchorage. “This is worth the eight hours on a plane,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, I got eight hours going back, too.”

In January, Chuck Schumer recruited Peltola to run, calling her the “last piece to the puzzle” of his midterms plan. Peltola, the state’s former at-large House member, launched her campaign with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” To most outsiders, this read as folksy branding for a race that would inevitably be dominated by Donald Trump. But Peltola really wants to talk about fish. Recently, I saw her speak at the elementary school in Utqiagvik, an Arctic town at the state’s northern tip. It was a very unusual stump speech. She apologized for the “super negative, toxic ads” flooding the state, including her own. She mentioned her opponent just once: a flattering anecdote about his advocacy for an oil project she supports. She didn’t mention Trump at all. And even though, compared with the rest of the state, salmon is not so big in Utqiagvik, Peltola still mostly talked about fish.

This piscine primacy is relatively new in Alaska’s politics. In past election cycles, fish have always been one issue among many. But Alaska’s fish are in crisis. In recent years, runs of Chinook, or king salmon, the biggest and most revered species on the Yukon River, have been down as much as eighty per cent from average levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Chum salmon, a more ordinary variety, have had an O.K. year, but they’ve been down as much as ninety per cent. Some species and some areas are worse off than others, but the general trend is bad, including for the state’s other two iconic seafood catches, halibut and crab. As I travelled around the state, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone I talked to was upset about the fish situation. One political consultant explained, “A lot of people come into the state, and they’re, like, ‘Why the hell is Mary Peltola “fish, family, freedom”?’ I’m a white guy who lives in Anchorage, and my freezer is currently full of rockfish, halibut, and salmon that I’ve caught because that’s just what we all do.”

The crisis is worst up rivers such as the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. For many thousands of years, entire Athabascan and Yup’ik villages have subsisted on salmon. ... But stocks have got so low that, in 2024, the Alaska government, in conjunction with Canada, shut down fishing for king salmon on the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years—one complete king-salmon life cycle. The fish camps stand empty. [...]

Research scientists with the N.P.F.M.C. and N.O.A.A. attribute the die-off, primarily, to climate change. But activists in Alaska have mostly focussed their ire on a type of fishing known as trawling. In the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, the main target of commercial fishing boats is pollock, a medium-sized, mild fish that swims in fantastically vast schools. Trawlers catch pollock by dragging enormous nets; some open wide enough to swallow a thousand M.T.A. buses. Any net you put in the water will incidentally catch other, non-targeted fish. This is known as bycatch. Every year, the Alaskan pollock industry brings up around twenty thousand king salmon and around a quarter million pounds of halibut as bycatch. Recently, anger at this collateral damage, heightened by the fish shortage, has evolved into a political movement. [...]

I’d assumed that pollock people—businesspeople—would lean Republican, and the salmon people—the conservation-oriented—would lean Democratic, but that’s not really the case. “There’s nothing partisan about it,” Peltola told me recently. “When you ask folks who are MAGA why they’re splitting the ticket and voting for me, it’s largely because of trawling.” (The campaign later pointed out that a lot of those voters are also animated by high fuel prices.) Politics in Alaska are idiosyncratic. They rarely map onto a national partisan model. Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, but independent voters outnumber both. “Partisan politics doesn’t work that well for a candidate,” Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to serve as governor, told me. A government staffer in a remote region put it to me, “Locally, no one gives a shit about the parties.”

One oddity of Alaska politics is that, though only twelve per cent of voters identify as Democrats, both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives are currently controlled by coalitions made up mostly of Democrats and independents, with some Republicans. Coalition governments are not uncommon in the state, where politicians are fond of saying that pragmatism trumps partisanship. Sometimes it’s more about vibes. “Somebody is a magnificent pain in the ass, and we don’t want them in our caucus so we build a caucus to exclude them,” Joelle Hall, a longtime union leader, told me. Imagine a congressional coalition formed by kicking out the lawmakers, on either side, who are annoying—the Ted Cruzes and the John Fettermans. Peltola tried to explain this unique approach by telling me that the current coalition “took the hardest people to work with and just put them to the side, and then everybody else joined as a majority to move forward and solve problems. And that is a model I am hoping we can export to every state in the nation.” [...]

“Alaskans consider themselves more Alaskan than Republican, and more Alaskan, quite honestly, than they are American,” Scott Kendall, an attorney and longtime G.O.P. political consultant in the state, told me. “We like each other. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful thing. And I’ve been back to D.C. and elsewhere enough to know how good we’ve got it.”...

As I spoke with Peltola voters across Alaska, I noticed a split between those who think she is talking too much about fishing, when a stronger message would be the war in Iran or gas prices, and those who worry that the outside strategists urging the Peltola campaign to focus on national topics will drown out her winning message. Alaska’s core constituency is composed of Natives, fishermen, rural legislators, and unions, with some chamber-of-commerce types mixed in. Peltola is a gun-owning, fish-catching Alaska-bush native, who has worked for mines and supports oil drilling, and is allied with the state’s largest labor unions. “You’ve got a once-in-a-generation candidate who is all the pieces of that coalition as one person,” the strategist told me. “You worry that the federal PACs will come in and fuck all that up. What’s actually somewhat surprising to me is that we’re here in October, and the dominant issue of the race is still trawl bycatch and local fisheries, which says they didn’t fuck it up that bad.” [...]

Trawling is a wedge issue in Kodiak. Many people rely on trawling, directly or indirectly, for work, but small seiners, long-liners, and crab fishermen have major issues with it. (“There’s five different fisheries groups, and they all basically think the others are stealing fish from them,” Hackney, the G.O.P. political consultant, told me.) ... We were at the brewery in town with the mayor, Terry Haines, who is also a retired fisherman, and the host of the Alaska Fisheries Report on KMXT, the local radio station. (He also d.j.s a half-hour spot of soul music every week.) “Bycatch is not the driver of our stock crashes,” he said. “It is simply the only lever that we have to pull. So that makes it a valid reason to look at pulling that lever. But you have to realize that you can pull that lever all the way down to the floor, and you’re still not going to change the environment that’s causing the fishery collapses.”

Peltola insists on what is called “rural preference”: in times of shortage, subsistence fishing must come first. Carrie Stevens, the representative for the Council of Athabascan Tribes, told me, “If people on the rivers have a moratorium to stand down, why is it so obscene to ask others to bear any brunt of conservation?” The tribes contend that the government’s scientists are underestimating the effect of trawling. One argument is that it’s not just the bycatch but the catch itself. Salmon eat juvenile pollock—or would, if they didn’t become fish sticks. Jim Balsiger, who retired as NOAA’s top fisheries official in Alaska in 2021, said recently, “Removing three to four billion pounds of fish from the Bering Sea every year for four decades is not a benign activity.” [...]

Fishing jobs like these are essential to Alaskan identity and have been declining across the state. Gunnar Knapp, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and a prominent fishery economist, told me that the trawling issue has become about more than just fishing regulations. “A lot of this is symbolic. There is a vision that the world economy has been moving inexorably toward this dystopia controlled by large corporations, capitalism, and global enterprises, where the individual is marginalized and means nothing,” Knapp said. “If you’ve ever seen a trawl net when it comes in, it seems so appalling. You think, ‘You won’t have any fish left in the ocean!’ Well, it actually is sustainable, for pollock. But it’s not noble like a guy holding up one subsistence salmon.” The choice for Alaskans is difficult: crack down significantly on trawl, and you’ll limit global food supply and inflict significant damage to the state economy. In return, you’ll possibly get small gains upriver. “It’s less economic than moral or ethical,” Knapp said. “What costs are worth it for even a marginal improvement to the salmon runs? I think some people would say anything is worth it.” As a friend in Anchorage put it, “Trawling is our version of data centers.”

by Zach Helfand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Clara Mokri / NYT / Redux

Swallow tailed cardinalfish (Verulux cypselurus)

via:

"Sardinemaxxing"

I Surrendered All My Decisions and Desires. All It Took Was Many, Many Tins of Fish (NYT).

***

"... today, tinned fish is as much a sensible grocery item as it is a status symbol, a viral “hot girl food,” a borderline luxury good. I think it would probably take a long time to explain... why you can buy limited-edition tinned fish at concerts and why there is coveted merch for sale about tinned fish and why a store exists in New York City called the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine where a single-serving tin of said fantastic sardine can cost $44. [...]

Because $44 feels like a small price to pay for a sociological education, I spent some weeks recently sampling as much of this genre as I could. I ate not just sardines but also smoked salmon marinated in chili oil, small-batch mussels in sweet pepper and garlic, various types of trout, anchovies and an enormous amount of t*** — so much t*** that I refuse to look at the word anymore and you cannot make me spell it out — and what I learned is that most of it tastes kind of just … OK?

... But as I “made dinner” after work every night, i.e. nibbled t*** straight out of the package like a raccoon (tinned-fish cookbooks do exist, but if you are someone who enjoys defaulting to the lowest common denominator of effort available, you, too, might be a secret raccoon), a different idea occurred to me.

by Amy X. Wang, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times

'Kawarikiri' - The Art of Garnishing

 

via: Japan Eats
[ed. Also, this Parrotfish (Uhu) sushi and saute (the scales are enormous):]

Neil Welliver aka Neil Gavin Welliver, Winter Rainbow, 1983

via:

Loren Holmes, Alaska pollock trawl fishery (ADN)
via:

Butchering a £5,000 Bluefin Tuna With a Sushi Master

We break down the entire fish from head to tail, exploring the different cuts of tuna, how the fat content and texture change throughout the fish, and which parts are best suited to sushi, sashimi, grilling and cooking. Along the way, we taste some of the most prized and unusual cuts.

In this video:

•⁠ ⁠Break down a whole 200kg bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn professional tuna butchery techniques
•⁠ ⁠Explore the different cuts of bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Taste lean, medium-fatty and fatty tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn how tuna is prepared for sushi and sashimi
•⁠ ⁠Discover rarely seen cuts
•⁠ ⁠Learn traditional Japanese sushi techniques 

•⁠ ⁠See how different parts of one tuna can taste completely different

The Deep Sea

The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal

[ed. Fun and informative (scroll down to different depths to see the various creatures that have been recorded there). For example, I had no idea thick-billed murres could dive that deep.]

Why So Quiet?

In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.

by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]

***

"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings.

In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."

Tsukiji Journal
via:

Salmon Sushi: Not a Japanese Tradition

Somewhere in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, a Norwegian marketing strategist stood in front of a room of Japanese seafood executives, served them raw salmon, and watched the room politely fall apart. The colour was wrong, they told him. Its smell, they said, had a river-like quality. Someone objected to the shape of the fish’s head.

I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.

What Japan actually ate before

Japanese cooks have used salmon for centuries. They grilled it, salted it, flaked it into rice balls and packed it into lunchboxes. Nippon.com describes grilled salmon and salmon flakes as fixtures of home cooking, with a hard line drawn between that cooked fare and anything sliced raw. The domestic workhorse was chum salmon: lean, firm, nobody’s idea of sashimi.

So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.

The parasite question, answered properly

There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.

Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.

Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.

A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.

Norway had too much fish

Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.

Freezers filled up.

The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.

Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.

A name change, then a decade of nothing

“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.

So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.

Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.

The deal that broke it open

In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.

That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.

Where salmon sits now

Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.

by Daniel Moran, Space Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not many people know this but there are actually six species of Pacific salmon (not five), including the cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) in Japan.]

Air Conditioners to Anchovies

China keeps the U.S. and Japan Cool. And most other places. The Chinese make more than 80% of the world’s air-conditioners. And they could… stop. 

The world’s biggest fan clubs for air-conditioning are the United States, and two Asian allies/ vassals, Japan and South Korea. In these three places, 88% to 91% of homes have such devices (IEA estimates). 

The demand for Chinese air-cons is rising world-wide, as heatwaves proliferate. Viral videos this week show customers fighting over the devices at shops in Europe. 

Is there any risk of China halting exports, in the way the US might do? Thankfully not, at the moment, analysts say. China keeps the industry entirely politics-free: We build, you buy, at a price that benefits both sides. 

The 'Assembled In...' Trick

The world has 2.4 billion air conditioners, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. But few people around the planet are aware that their aircons come from China, because of branding techniques.

by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:

***

One of the world’s current hottest commodities is in the midst of a huge disruption. It may sound like I’m talking about oil and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but this is even more severe. The supply shock is far greater — and so is the price response: Global production has plunged as much as 40% from a year ago; prices are up 80% over the same period to an all-time high. The commodity in question? The humble anchovy.

The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks. 

Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.

Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]

In mid-May, Peru imposed a 15-day ban on anchovy fishing; the moratorium was later extended until June 10. Then, the government in Lima shocked the fishing business with an indefinite ban. The South American anchoveta is the world’s largest single-species fishery. The ban has triggered a dramatic drop in global fishmeal production, which industry executives estimate to be down 30% to 40% from a year ago.

With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]

Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.

by Javier Blas, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: REDA/Universal Images Group Editorial

[ed. Globalization and supply chain logistics.]

The Modern Efficiency of Squid Fishing

How Japanese Fishermen Use Robots To Catch Billions Of Squid (IE).

Video: YouTube

[ed. For calamari lovers. Squid fishing has gotten pretty efficient these days (and they land some big ones!). I remember catching them at night with my brothers in Kona, to use as bait for over-night tuna fishing (Ika Shibi). We'd go a ways offshore, put out a parachute anchor, then turn on the floodlights to attract them to the boat. Soon there'd be hundreds of them darting in and out of the light, coming from nowhere, out in the middle of the ocean. Using a multi-pronged snagging jig we'd catch our needed supply in no time. Fun! But wierd too - being surrounded by darkness except for the lights illuminating a small circle around the boat. It felt like fishing in a swimming pool.]

Bakufu Ohno, Herring, from Familiar Fishes of Nippon, 1937

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Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.

In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.

By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.

That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.

I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)

Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.

More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.

With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?

In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.

In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.

There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.

In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]

Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.

But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.

Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.

At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]

No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.

by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]

Maureen Crosbie

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Naoki Hayashi, Flight School - Breaking the Surface
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Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food

Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”

But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.

Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.” (...)

According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.

Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”

The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...

“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.

Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)

However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Read more:

Images: via; and Masuda Yoshirо̄/Courtesy Japan House

[ed. For many more examples, see also: Photos show hyper-realistic plastic food that is a $90 million industry in Japan (MYSA).]