I found myself in a mini-mall in Des Moines, Iowa earlier today and happened to notice the following hand-lettered sign in the window of a Thai restaurant:

 We Now Offer Sushi!  Delivery Too!

As someone whose definition of happiness is sharing a large platter of sushi and a couple of Sapporos with one or more good friends, this sign bothered me for any number of reasons.

First, people, it was a Thai restaurant.  Would you eat sushi at a German restaurant? Then what is it that makes a Thai restaurant any more plausible as a vendor of raw fish, seaweed, and rice, other than the fact that Japan and Thailand are both in Asia, albeit many thousands of miles and radically different cultural and culinary traditions apart?

Second, the sign was scrawled in black magic marker.  At restaurants that specialize in sushi, the chefs train for years.  For some reason, the unwilligness of this restaurant to invest 29 bucks in a professionally printed sign suggested to me a rather shorter training period, and a decidedly less rigorous dedication to quality. 

Third, the sign’s “now,” in particular, raised my hackles, because the opportunistic and yet extremely tardy me-too-ism implied by its enthusiastic proffer of a product that has been popular in America for about three decades somehow implied an equally crass and laggard approach to quality. 

Fourth, the restaurant was in Des Moines.  This is not a criticism of Des Moines, which is a sprawling, prosperous, and surprisingly sophisticated city, but rather a commentary on its geographic status, to wit: Its location thousands of miles from any available ocean.

Fifth, this particular Thai restaurant was in the middle of a mini-mall in the middle of a middle-American city many miles away from any actual source of seafood, and yet it was proposing to attenuate this supply chain even further by placing the sushi, many varieties of which depend heavily, remember, on raw fish for their gustatory effect, into the back of a van and delivering it, sooner or later, to your house or office where it might, or might not, be consumed every bit as soon as it should be.

And it was, by the way, an extremely and unseasonably warm day.

All in all, as a recipe for painful food poisoning or a long-term parasitic infection, this scheme would seem to have few equals.  Sushi has been part of the urban American scene for around three decades now, but as stragglers like this Thai restaurant, some of whom may not be quite as careful as they should be about proper preparation or pre-freezing,  get into the game, it seems increasingly likely that someone, somewhere in America, is going to have a very bad lunch of it. 

Nor is this a concern only to those less-painstaking restaurants and their patrons.  As we’ve seen with so many other food-poisoning cases in recent years, the health consequences of a single dicey California roll or bad batch of maguro could become gut-wrenching for an entire industry.   

The sushi business faces other serious problems as well, most notably the greedy and short-sighted plunder of our fisheries, resulting in sinking stocks of some of our most popular fish.  True, if raw fish continues to be peddled, in effect, out of the backs of overheated vans, the resultant problems, while bad news for someone’s digestive tract, could eventually be good news indeed for the dwindling schools of fish that continue to wriggle in our coastal waters.  

But it seems to me that a responsible industry would be doing as much as it possibly could to preserve the health of both.   I’ll do my part:  I’ll never order green curry with shrimp at a Japanese restaurant, and I will definitely never order an inside-out salmon roll with ikura in a Thai one. 

 

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