Sushi's Extraordinary Evolution: From Pickle to Primetime

0:02You find it in high-end restaurants, of course, but you can find it in Chinese restaurants. You can find it in supermarkets and gas stations and ballparks. And I was just in Mexico and at the Mexico City airport, there's this traditional sushi bar right there. You can just find sushi in almost any location, highbrow, lowbrow, you name it. It's pretty incredible. And everyone is eating it. My 12-year-old niece basically can't get enough sushi. She'd eat it all the time if she could. Parents are going broke from their kids. Sushi obsession. A Wall Street Journal article claims for some families, sushi has replaced pizza as the birthday party staple, and parents are paying a heavy price.

0:44When I was a kid, I'd never heard of sushi. But today, it's everywhere, and it's everything. Like sushi pizza, sushi burritos, and on and on and on. So whatever you can do with this sandwich, you can do with sushi. It's so flexible. But so how did sushi take over the world? How did we get here? We got old, Cynthia. I hate to break it to you. Okay, but really, it wasn't that that long ago that sushi was basically unknown in America. How did it become so popular that you can find it in the gas station? Well, and while we're talking about ancient history, it's not that that long ago that sushi didn't even mean raw fish on top of white rice.

1:21So how did sushi go from being a Chinese pickle to the California roll we know and love today? And what does all this have to do with World War II, the movie The Breakfast Club, and our recurring favorite, microbes? Drink! This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. We gather here tonight to bring women back to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu original series from the executive producers of The Handmaid's Tale.

1:57It's easier to accept a story than believe that the people around you are monsters. The battle isn't over. There comes a time when you have to take action, when you have to choose your own destiny. Never quite as it seems. Watch the new Hulu original series, The Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. Spring Black Friday is on at the Home Depot. Save on grills and patio sets that will be sure to bring your hosting game up a notch. Fire up your feast with help from the Home Depot and save on grills. Like the next grill four-burner propane gas grill was$249, now in special buy for$199.

2:31Or give everyone the best seat in the yard with the Hampton Bay Mayfield Park four-piece conversation set for only$399. Save on grills and patio sets with low prices guaranteed during Spring Black Friday, only at the Home Depot. Now through April 22nd, while supplies last. Exclusion supplies to homedepot.com slash price match for details. Well, to understand the history of sushi and the earliest form of it, you have to completely reverse your entire understanding of sushi. Today, sushi is all about the rice. Trevor Corson is the author of the book The Story of Sushi. But once upon a time, you didn't eat rice at all to call your dish sushi.

3:03Eric Rath is the author of Oishi, The History of Sushi. And he tracked down the earliest sushi recipe in a Chinese book called The Important Arts for the People's Welfare, compiled sometime in the mid-500s. And it tells you how sushi is made. And in this context, sushi is fermented. And basically, a freshwater fish is cleaned. It's salted. It's put away for a while. So the salt does its work getting the moisture out of the fish. And then the salt is washed away. And it's packed with some kind of grain. And it doesn't necessarily have to be rice. It can be some kind of millet. and 6, 8, 12 months later, it's unsealed.

3:46This earliest recipe for sushi is nothing like we'd eat today. This is fish fermented for a year by lactic acid fermentation, like you'd use to make yogurt, pickles, kimchi. The microbes for those can feed on the sugars in the vegetables or the milk, but fish has almost no sugar. So in this case, the millet or rice feeds the microbes that create acids that then ferment the fish. Basically, it's a clever technique to preserve protein. Before refrigeration, you could smoke or salt fish to stop microbes growing on it. But this grain-based lactic acid preservation works by recruiting friendly microbes to keep the bad guys out.

4:23And in the process, it creates a whole new flavor explosion. And that original version of it, the fish was a kind of fermented fish that is sort of similar in some ways to cheese. It was kind of fermented with a lot of esters and acids and flavor compounds from the fermentation process. So it probably tasted like a cheesy aged fish. Cheesy is not a description I look for when it comes to fish. Eric's tried this kind of long fermented sushi. It's rare to find today, but a few people still make it. There are modern versions of this in Japan. And it's remarkable because the taste profile becomes something like a prosciutto or a summer sausage.

5:02and it's all due to lactic acid fermentation. This same fermentation that's used in yogurt is using this type of sushi and it gives it a sour taste, but it also gives it this meaty flavor, which is incredible. Eric says in ancient China, people often use the savory, sour pickled fish to add to soups and other simmered dishes just as a little burst of flavor. You don't want to eat a lot of it. I made that mistake once and my mouth tasted like bile because it was so salty. But if you just have a little select amount with a little sake, it's very nice. So that's the fish, but there's also grain in the recipe.

5:39The Chinese used both millet and rice to help preserve the fish, but whichever one they used, it wouldn't have been edible at the end of the process. The grain, the rice becomes kind of a mush, and it's so salty and so sour that it'll turn your head around. So most people don't eat the rice. They just eat the fish. No one knows exactly where this technique of using your grain to ferment fish got started. It probably emerged multiple different places and times in Southeast and East Asia. In Delta regions, rice farming and freshwater fish went hand in hand, so using one to preserve the other would make sense.

6:15But in any case, it was big in China, and that's where both the earliest written sushi recipes in the world are found, and also Chinese characters that are related to the word sushi were used. We don't know its exact origins, but the xi part may have come from a Chinese word that referred to preserved fish. So you may be thinking, wait a minute, if sushi was so big in China back in the day, why is it not today? We don't think of sushi as Chinese. Eric says it was popular through the 1700s, but then for a variety of reasons, people started preserving their fish differently and sushi just dropped off the map there.

6:52And in Japan, it becomes a dish all and on its own. Eric says the first reference in Japan was from the 700s, and it does seem to have spread there from China. The Japanese likely adopted the shi sound from China and then added their own descriptor. The su part comes from probably the word sour in Japanese, so sour, preserved, fish. Or sushi, but not as we know it today. Like in China, the Japanese were sometimes using millet and sometimes using rice, but also they weren't always using fish as the protein. They made sushi out of abalone. They made it out of freshwater fish. But mountainous areas, they made sushi out of wild boar and deer.

7:31So there was meat sushi back then as well. In medieval times, after a few hundred years of enjoying this slow fermented, cheesy preserved fish or meat, Japanese people lost their patience. People just got tired of waiting around for a year to eat their sushi. So rather than wait the full time, they would eat it sooner. And in that case, the rice is not as sour. It's a little more agreeable. It's got a little more body to it. Which was a great thing because rice in particular was expensive and it had a lot of calories. Why throw it away if you don't have to? But still, why wait weeks when you want to eat sushi?

8:08So in the 18th century, 17th, 18th century, people start experimenting with how do we make sushi faster? Let's add vinegar. And so rather than this long period of fermentation that transformed the rice, changed the taste, you just add the vinegar to the rice with some salt. Vinegared sushi was still sour, though not nearly as sour as the original. And the fish isn't preserved the same way. It wasn't raw, though. It was still lightly pickled and typically also cooked somehow. These transformations were being made in Edo. This is what's now Tokyo. And it became first the military and administrative capital of Japan in the 1600s.

8:47And then it became the actual capital in the 1800s. And people there loved their quick fix sushi. So the story is that these vendors would be selling Edomai sushi. and it was meant to be a portable little like a pocket thing that you could just carry in your hand and eat really casually. Nancy Matsumoto is a food writer. Her latest book is Reaping What She Sews, How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. She's also written extensively about sake and Japanese cuisine. So Mai means in front of. Apparently it was along Tokyo Bay. It was in front of the sprawling city of Edo that you would find these pushcart vendors.

9:26and it was really kind of like street food of the day. So very casual, but a way to have a quick portable lunch. Nancy told us that sushi was not at all fancy back then. Now, you know, it's so expensive. We think of it as like it must have always been rarefied, but I think it's kind of humble in its origins. Edo is also where nigiri was invented. Before, sushi wasn't necessarily a piece of fish pressed on a handful of rice. You might have just eaten the fish. You might have scooped up the rice. But in Edo, people needed something handheld so they could eat on the go. And so in the 1700s, someone, no one knows who, figured out that if you pressed a slice of fish on top of a slightly flattened cylinder of rice and squeezed it together with some condiments, the resulting nigiri sushi was the perfect street food.

10:14Kind of like a hot dog. And indeed, the size of the sushi is about the size of a hot dog. And even into the 1920s, 1930s, people who want good sushi go to a place where you'd stand and eat, like a hot dog stand today in the United States. So it's street food. It's quick grab and go kind of meal. So sushi changed form in Edo, and it also changed ingredients. Edo was located on a saltwater bay, and there were lots of fresh ocean fish available. And so people begin using those rather than river fish. And somewhere along the way, they also decided that deer and wild boar don't make good sushi either.

10:54So Edo-style sushi became associated with fish rather than meat. The other kind of sushi that was invented in this golden age of sushi innovation is the roll, or maki. Now, in Japan, when these were invented in the 19th century, they're very simple. We just have geometric tubular shape with rice and something like cucumber or gourd inside. Pickled gourd. In some super early rolls, people actually used paper for the rolls wrapper and they couldn't eat it. But then someone had a brilliant idea about how to create a paper that you could eat. Right around the same time, early 19th century, Someone saw what they were doing with papermaking in Japan and applied that to nori, the seaweed.

11:42And you can get a nice flat sheet of that and you can roll things up in it. Such as sushi. And then you can take your rice and whatever you wanted to put inside. People sometimes made thick rolls too, but generally it's very slim trim kind of thing of cucumber or this preserved gourd that I mentioned earlier. Maybe some egg in there. And the mats they use to roll those rolls, they're made of bamboo and look like window shades, which is apparently what they were modeled after. So in the 1700s and 1800s in Edo slash Tokyo, sushi was completely transformed. It went from a method of preserving freshwater fish and meat that took months to make to something that was made to order using fish from the ocean.

12:26And it also went from kind of a pickle format that you ate alongside or in other things into a fully-fledged handheld snack. But as popular as sushi was in Tokyo, which is what Edo became in 1868, all these rolls and the nigiri and all this street food, it was really only super popular in Tokyo. There was a survey done by Japanese ethnologists in 1941 where they were looking into popular traditions in rural Japan. And they asked him, you know, what kind of sushi do you make? And a lot of folks didn't know what sushi was, which I found astounding. In the early 1900s, in more rural areas of Japan, And some people were still making the traditional fermented kind of sushi using meat and vegetables.

13:05They were using dried gourds and taro stalks and carp from the rivers, whatever was local. They didn't know the forms of sushi that we know today, the nigiri sushi, the sushi roll, the makizushi. Then there was a huge earthquake in 1923 that led to major fires that basically burned Tokyo down. And then the city was bombed in World War II. And so a lot of people living in Tokyo fled to their home regions. This included people who wanted to eat sushi and people who knew how to make it. So after the war in the late 40s and onward, Tokyo-style sushi became the style of sushi. The other thing that happened was, wait for it, my favorite topic, refrigeration.

13:41First with ice, and then mechanical. And what that meant was people didn't have to rely on lacto-fermenting their fish anymore to preserve it. So a lot of those rural styles just died out. Ice was great, and it was even more useful on brand new long-range ocean trawlers. These innovations together also meant that the fish used to make sushi was transformed again. With this flash freezing technology on these huge trawlers, they're able to go beyond Japan's waters really globally to source fish. So that is a huge change. This is part of the reason for the rise of bluefin tuna in sushi. We have that story in our episode All Aboard the Tuna Rollercoaster.

14:19You should check it out. Another huge change came about because of wartime rationing. Like we said, before the war, a piece of sushi was the size of a hot dog. During and after, it shrunk down to the bite-sized piece of rice and fish we know today. Before the war, you would have eaten your sushi at an outdoor stand. But during the war, the government shut down those stands because they were considered a health hazard. So after the war, sushi moved indoors into restaurants, where even more innovations took place. You have inventions like conveyor belt sushi, where this man in Osaka, he had a stand-up sushi restaurant, and he thought, you know, how can I best present my dishes to the customers and excite them to order more?

14:59Well, he visited either a meatpacking plant or a beer brewery and saw the conveyor belts and put two and two together and came up with this idea of conveyor belt sushi. And initially, people stood in those restaurants until he decided to allow them to sit down because they would eat more. This conveyor belt genius was a guy called Shiraishi Yoshiaki, and he transformed his sushi restaurant, Jen Roku, into the world's first conveyor belt restaurant in 1958. And people loved it, especially families and young people. They found it way more welcoming and fun than the old school snack stands. Oh, it's amazing.

15:34It's like being on an auto assembly line, except sushi is going by, not car parts. And yeah, basically it's, you know, little plates of sushi with plastic covers are going by. And then you tally up your plates, and they give you your bill based on the plates and the colors of the plates. Mr. Yoshiaki eventually opened about 250 restaurants. And though his chain faded out, plenty of competitors launched their own versions, and the conveyor belt sushi restaurant itself is still going strong. They're all over Japan, and there are chains of them that are really popular and unbelievably inexpensive, too.

16:12But at the same time as Japan got wealthier, especially in the economic boom of the 1980s, an extremely ritzy version of this former street snack also emerged. And at the time, Japan was so economically powerful and people really had a lot of new wealth. So people would be spending on these high-end sushi bars. And I think that's probably where a lot of this lavishness that you see now probably evolved. But how did this raw fish on rice that you might spend a week's salary on, how did that conquer America as well? That story after the break.

17:07Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Carvana. Delivery fees and terms may apply. Poetry is one of the greatest tools we have. It offers a way to better understand our own lives and the lives of others. I'm Maggie Smith, poet and host of The Slowdown. Every weekday, I share one poem and a few minutes of reflection. five minutes to breathe, to notice, to begin again. It's an easy ritual you can take anywhere, your kitchen, your neighborhood, or your morning commute. Start a new daily practice and listen to The Slowdown wherever you get your podcasts.

18:02Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. One of the earliest records of sushi in America comes from a Los Angeles newspaper in the early 1900s when a socialite in L.A. served it to make a splash at a fancy luncheon.

18:38But there were also reports at the time of sushi being served as far afield as North Dakota. There were Japanese immigrants to the U.S. at the time, and Westerners had also started traveling to Japan more often after the country had opened up to foreigners in the late 1800s. But then fewer Japanese immigrated to America after 1907, when the U.S. and Japan made an informal agreement. Japan wouldn't send more immigrants our way, and America wouldn't impose restrictions on immigrants, like segregating Japanese children in different schools. And then the relationship got even worse. The landscape completely changed during wartime, of course, and then it's not until the 1960s where, in the same area, in Los Angeles and on the West Coast, sushi takes off again.

19:21When Nancy was a kid in L.A. in the 1960s, sushi wasn't something you really found in restaurants. She had it at home, often for New Year's. Her grandma would make a whole spread of special foods. And the kind she made was called futomaki, which means literally fat roll. The futomaki has kind of has it all. It has the tamagoyaki, the omelet. She would do marinated and cooked shiitake mushrooms. she did this thing called obora, which would be, probably was fresh fish in Japan, but in America she would get canned shrimp and sort of grind it into sort of a meal. Obora is a dish of minced fish. Nancy's grandma used canned shrimp, and she put some greens in her fat rolls too.

20:05These weren't just for New Year's. She'd make sushi for a lot of the major holidays. I remember telling a friend that whenever we celebrated Thanksgiving, we always had turkey and we always had sushi. And he thought it was very weird. And it was only then that I thought, oh, maybe that is kind of weird. But to me, it was just normal. It would have been weird for most non-Japanese Americans because, like we said, sushi wasn't really available in restaurants. The first sushi bar in the continental U.S. that served Tokyo-style sushi seems to have opened in 1965 in L.A.'s little Tokyo area. It was called Kawafuku.

20:40There was apparently sushi available in Hawaii earlier, and Japanese restaurants in L.A. had previously served tofu pockets stuffed with sushi rice, but this was something different. That was a kind of deliberate effort to start a sushi trade in the United States by business people. One was a manager for mutual trading, and another was an entrepreneur. Mutual trading was the largest importer of Japanese food, drinks, ingredients, equipment, everything you'd need to make Japanese cuisine. It's still around today. And this was back in like the mid-60s. The Japanese fellow took the American to a fancy sushi bar in Tokyo and he fell in love.

21:20And they decided, because mutual trading is a huge import company, that they could bring in everything needed for a sushi culture. So kind of like importing it wholesale, all the different parts of it. But it didn't really catch on outside of the Japanese community at first. Japanese businessmen started to bring their American colleagues. So there were a few people who started trying it. Some of these people fell in love with sushi, but it was an uphill struggle. Because at the time, if you asked a non-Japanese American what Japanese food was, they probably wouldn't have even mentioned sushi. Here's a clip from a scene set in 1969.

21:57It's from the movie Zodiac. And two cops are talking in a car. They're snacking on animal crackers. You ever try Japanese food? You mean like teriyaki? No, like the urchin, raw fish. I'm eating it, Bill. Teriyaki is meat, usually chicken or beef. It's brushed in a salty sweet sauce that includes soy sauce, then it's grilled or pan-fried. That's something that would be a more familiar dish to white Americans. That's synonymous with Japanese food. It's not sushi at all. It wasn't really until around 1970 that a sushi bar opened closer to Beverly Hills. And that's when Hollywood celebrities discovered sushi and started eating it.

22:36Yul Brynner was famously one of the early fans of sushi and helped popularize it. John Belushi, the samurai whatever, you know, on Saturday Night Live. Apparently he was a big sushi fan. Like a room for the night, please. We'll see you all. You'll see you all. And once it became kind of a Hollywood thing, the Hollywood celebrities all started eating it. And then there was suddenly demand for sushi restaurants in L.A. And a bunch of Japanese chefs realized they could come and do business in L.A. with celebrities. And once the celebrities were into sushi, other people, mostly in the bigger cities, wanted to do what the celebrities were doing.

23:13And so sushi restaurants started to open on both coasts. Back in the early 60s, when New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne mentioned sushi in an article, he said it was, quote, too far out for most New York diners. A decade later, Manhattan was full of sushi restaurants and Claiborne said that New Yorkers were, quote, dining on raw fish with a gusto previously reserved for cornflakes. And then a bunch of things happened that helped propel sushi further into the limelight. There was a big deal government report about the American diet in 1979. And as one of their recommendations, they suggested eating more fish, like all the fish you'd find at a sushi restaurant.

23:51But it's not until the 1980s where it really takes off and sushi goes full blast to the U.S. culture. And that's exactly the time, too, that the Japanese economy and trade with the United States is taking off as well. And we have shows like Shogun on TV.

24:10Richard Chamberlain played a British ship captain who went to Japan in the 1600s, and it was all about the life of the shogun warriors. It was an enormous hit. It was one of the most popular TV shows in NBC's history. Literally one-third of Americans watched this show. It was a huge cultural moment. And that also really created a groundwork for interest in all things Japanese in the United States, which helped make sushi become more popular too. And then another thing that made sushi cool was that during the same time, as we said, Japan had become an economic powerhouse. The country had been broke after its defeat in World War II, but then its economy grew a lot through electronics.

24:47And Japanese companies like the one that invented the Walkman, Sony, these companies and their products became huge all around the world. And Japan is booming in this period. This is a time where the popular magazines were showing images of Japan Incorporated taking over, you know, giant sumo wrestlers grabbing buildings in New York City. And as Japanese companies were taking over Wall Street and Japanese products were taking over America, suddenly there were sushi references everywhere in popular culture, too. Like in the 1984 cult classic movie Repo Man. Oh dear, what a shame. Come on, Duke, let's go do those crimes.

25:30Yeah, let's go get sushi and not pay. It's just this very surreal kind of offbeat movie. So to me, that was like when it was cool, it was kind of new, and it was like if you were a hipster, that's what you would do is like, let's go get sushi. Except you probably had to pay. Right. And you might have had to pay a lot because at the time in America, sushi was still pretty expensive. So while it might have been cool, if you were eating sushi, you probably had some money. You could be exotic and kind of show off that you were doing something no one else was doing, that you were brave, that you knew something, you were in the know, you were ahead of the curve.