28 ms·

Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan

142 points by cwwc 4y ago

innocentoldguy 4y ago
This isn’t true. I lived in Japan for several years in the 80s and had salmon sushi a few times. It wasn’t popular, but it existed.
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  It set off nonsense alarms in my head, though I don't have first-hand experience - but I had some ideas on how it could be disproven. I went to archive.org and found a book about fish preparation from 1977. Searching for "sashimi" (raw fish sushi) shows several results, including an entire section about it. This tweeter is full of shit. https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/280/mode/2up?q=sashimi https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/28...
  - groffee 4y ago
    Salmon. Not raw fish. Proper source: https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-norwegian-salmon-industry-created-a-sushi-staple https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n... TL:DR "Traditionally Japanese do not eat salmon sushi and it was invented in the 80's by the Norwegians to to try to sell more of their over abundance of Salmon." See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      This page specifically suggests using salmon for sashimi, and doesn't present the idea as particularly novel: https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/264/mode/2up?q=sashimi https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/26...
      - ipsum2 4y ago
        This is a book about US cuisine?
      - agos 4y ago
        that's not a japanese source, and tells us nothing about the consumption habit of japan before the 90s
    - froh 4y ago
      they didn't eat raw salmon because unfrozen salmon has parasites. aquaculture salmon doesn't have these parasites, likewise deep freezing (as in -20°C for a week or -35°C for a day) makes it safe to eat. so they knew why they didn't eat raw salmon.
  - yorwba 4y ago
    It would be more convincing if that book were in Japanese. After all, the claim is about the popularity of raw salmon sushi in Japan, specifically.
  - bborud 4y ago
    According to a friend of mine who lives in Japan and fits the stereotype "foodie", reality is somewhere in the middle. Farmed Norwegian salmon was indeed seen as a less desirable option for sushi - and apparently still is. According to him, higher end restaurants usually don't serve salmon sushi. He thought the tweet was a bit sensationalistic and pointed to that Norwegian salmon isn't as popular in sushi as the tweet suggests. But there are other ways to prepare fish besides sushi.
    - kuhewa 4y ago
      Well, for a foodie it probably isn't, a sushi enthusiast is going to be into the terroir of the fish, farm raised salmon is kinda hamfisted in that sense, slight step above a California roll. But that doesn't preclude it from assuming a niche in the convenience food sort of sushi.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    yeah I had the same feeling. the way it’s written feels like it’s semi-apocryphal to prove some kind of point about marketing
ris58h 4y ago
Reading articles on Twitter? How about no?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- javaunsafe2019 4y ago
  How about yes?
  - foreverobama 4y ago
    [dead]
- bborud 4y ago
  When tweets become "articles" the problem isn't really twitter, but suggests the reader may have trouble correctly describing their process of finding things out. When reading this twitter thread I was intrigued so I: - Looked at the export numbers - Asked a couple of friends of mine (one in Japan and one who works in the norwegian salmon industry) - Did a few searches for news coverage about salmon exports to Japan and read a couple of articles while skimming half a dozen more. - Found a master thesis describing "Project Japan" which I've downloaded and will read when I get back from work tonight. "Reading articles on twitter" isn't a thing.
- sleepyhead 4y ago
  AI generated Twitter articles that have not been fact checked and published by someone who doesn't know anything about the subject. Yay.
samspenc 4y ago
I've always wondered about the history of eating raw meat. My family personally doesn't eat anything raw because of the news reports we've read of people getting sick (or worse) after consuming raw meat, and we make sure to only eat fully cooked meat. My grandparents' generation also seem more familiar with fully cooked meat, I'm wondering whether raw meat came along more recently and where it originated from. At least in the West.
- gregoriol 4y ago
  Maybe knowledge and techniques to make raw meat/fish safe have improved in the last decades?
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    The roots of sushi were in preservation of fish by fermentation. The major food safety improvements recently were probably for industrialized production, where the issues were often creations of modernity anyway. OTOH onboard flash freezing equipment for fisheries haven't hurt.
- voytec 4y ago
  In Poland, steak tartare (raw ground beef with raw egg yolk, onion, fermented cucumber, pickled mushrooms, salt and pepper) has always been massively popular. In the 90s and 00s, raw yolk was optional due to "popularity" of salmonella. Raw beef meat was somehow still acceptable.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    In Germany, "Tartar" is without egg or veggies, but more spices. Common, just like "Mett" which is raw ground pork with onions, salt and pepper.
    - ant6n 4y ago
      In some areas of Germany, they add a raw egg yolk into the raw pork or beef, and add minced onions, all to be eaten on breakfast bread.
Garlef 4y ago
Here's a YT video from a few months ago that has some additional information: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4
boulos 4y ago
Previous discussion of NPR article covering the 1980s push by Norway to get Japanese people to accept salmon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823
bwv848 4y ago
And yet you should avoid farmed salmon[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_salmonids#Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_salmonids#Issue...
- sneak 4y ago
  From your link: > The US in their dietary guidelines for 2010 recommends eating 8 ounces per week of a variety of seafood and 12 ounces for lactating mothers, with no upper limits set and no restrictions on eating farmed or wild salmon. ? What am I missing?
  - itwasntandy 4y ago
    Keep reading. For example: > A recent study in British Columbia links the spread of parasitic sea lice from river salmon farms to wild pink salmon in the same river
    - Jolter 4y ago
      If we’re talking food safety, I don’t believe those sea lice are any danger to a consumer. Don’t they just invade the gills of the fish?
      - itwasntandy 4y ago
        I wasn’t talking about food safety. The lice from the farmed fish devastate the wild salmon populations, so ecologically they are awful. That to me is a pretty clear reason to avoid farmed salmon.
        Jolter 4y ago
        I’m sorry, I believe the topic was dietary guidelines. But you’re right, of course, if we should consider the environment as well. I haven’t eaten fish in 8 years, personally, partly because so much of it is fished or farmed in an unsustainable way.
ksec 4y ago
I am pretty sure Project Japan has very little to do with it. Ultimately Salmon Sashimi took off in the East Asia region as well as the Sushi world outside of Japan. And Japan being Japan, took their time to evaluate it due to culture issues.
a_c 4y ago
IMO it isn't much about parasites, it is more a B2B sales tactics turned B2C, and turns out general public likes it. The Project Japan pitch in 1985 was targeting a group of japanese industry experts. It is this group of expert that says the salmon contains parasites hence the customer won't eat it. But in the 90s, after the striking the deal with Nichirei, they find that customer actually like the fatty taste of salmon, parasites wasn't a concern to most. It's like facebook/tiktok pitching their platform to an HN crowd and we obsess over security, privacy, social bubble, vision and stuff, turns out no one give a damn. People like scrolling on the phone aimlessly. That's the fatty salmon
- kuhewa 4y ago
  This tracks with the historic consumption of other species that are also hosts to zoonotic nematodes raw. It's worth noting that wild salmon do have a very high natural prevalence of Anasakid roundworms.. however these aren't microscopic by any means and a sushi chef could easily screen for them. I think it probably was just about having a consistent, abundant and standardized product rather than highly seasonal and variable wild salmon. You might not be able to beat the right word salmon in the right part of the year if you are are real connoisseur but that isn't amenable to mass consumption. The fat distribution is different as well in a farm raised salmon even if the amount was the same, large visible deposits and it has a very noticable mouth feel and flavour. Long story short I reckon farm raised salmon took off there for the same reason it has in chain restaurants (cooked) in the US.
- joatmon-snoo 4y ago
  There are still old-school sushi chefs who refuse to eat salmon. And the parasite concern was absolutely a major problem. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/729396914 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/729396914
  - sethammons 4y ago
    Which is the same as "there are still old school HN technologists who refuse to use Facebook. And the privacy/security is absolutely a major problem."
foreverobama 4y ago
[dead]
franciscop 4y ago
Seems like salmon sushi didn't start at all with Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4
interactivecode 4y ago
My favorite salmon fact is that salmon was really common in the West European rivers. They aren't there anymore due to damming, watermills and other industrialization slowing down the rivers causing them to contain more mud and sand rather than rocks. https://historiek.net/komt-watermolen-deed-nederlandse-zalm-de-das-om/60756/ https://historiek.net/komt-watermolen-deed-nederlandse-zalm-... I've heard from multiple sources that even some old professions had rules about how often they can be force to eat salmon. For example this source talks about how messengers are protected and are only allowed to eat salmon 2-3 times a week. I've seen similar rules in an old dutch servants cook book. http://www.gestolengrootmoeder.nl/wordpress/dienstboden-wilden-niet-meer-dan-drie-keer-per-week-zalm-eten-echt/ http://www.gestolengrootmoeder.nl/wordpress/dienstboden-wild...
- ljf 4y ago
  So fascinating how quickly things change. Only 150 years ago lobster was the food of the poor in the UK.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    And in Australia. And chicken was rich person food
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      And in UK. Back in the sixties, in my fairly well-off bourgeois family, chicken was a rare treat. And even now, not all chicken is cheap; I don't know how much poulet de Bresse costs in France, but it's pretty pricey here.
- vintermann 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure refrigeration played a major role in making fish less of a poor people's food.
mustafa_pasi 4y ago
I don't get the appeal or raw protein. I tasted it all, raw eggs, raw fish, raw beef and it all just does not taste very good, not as good as the cooked variant.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Agreed though smoked salmon is pretty nice imo.
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  It's quite literally a matter of taste. I enjoy these so my perspective: * raw beef (tartare): the taste of raw beef "makes sense" if you like rare steak. It's a very full umami flavour quite unlike most food. * sushi: raw salmon on nice sticky rice might as well be beef.. cake. It's buttery, breaks apart in your mouth, sweet without actually being sweet. * salted pork: very good also, the salt and fat go together well, i usually eat this with something sweet. * eggs: I don't do raw eggs either. For reference, I've eaten and prepared a lot of different kinds of meat in my life (smoked, dried, grilled, fried etc.) so eating it raw is only a small leap away.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    Cooked salmon, like cooked oyster (without condiments) actually stinks. Only the raw version makes sense.
  - ahartmetz 4y ago
    * raw pork: Mett is pretty popular in Germany and not a fine dining thing (at all). It is IMO best with extra onion. * raw beef: Filet américain is basically a spicy beef tartare, available in most supermarkets in Belgium and the Netherlands. I can recommend both of these to carnivores :)
  - bwv848 4y ago
    Raw grass carp cut into thin transparent slices: chewy, sweet but not overwhelmingly, with lots of fresh flavors, very good for salad but you should not eat it anyway as it can contain liver fluke Raw shrimp: crunchy and fresh, not as sweet as fish Sushi grade raw egg available in my region: the white is smell-less slime with a tiny little bit of taste, the yolk has a mellow sweetness, I can understand why Japanese pair it with rice.
camtarn 4y ago
This Twitter thread is mostly a summary of this article, which provides more detail, albeit maybe in a less easily digestible (ha!) form: https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-invention-9189d9cd78b7 https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-in... The thread is actually wrong on the campaign cost, which might be attributable to the AI-powered summarisation the tweet author boasts about. Norway spent 30m kroner (NOK) on the campaign, which is about $3.75 million instead of the $30m the tweet claims. And the thread misses out the potential return on investment: Norwegian salmon imports to Japan went from 400 million NOK before the campaign, to 1.8 billion NOK in the second half of the 80's.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  > which might be attributable to the AI-powered summarisation the tweet author boasts about Just one of the pitfalls of relying on AI and not double-checking the information. I worry for the future. How much might the past be rewritten in the future as a result?
  - camtarn 4y ago
    The funny thing was that the author apparently used multiple sources, and has different import figures from the article as a result. But they didn't spot the order-of-magnitude error in the campaign cost.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Bah. Complaining that AI gets summaries wrong is like complaining that a singing dog is out of tune. /s
    - aaron695 4y ago
      [dead]
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Very interesting share, thanks. When I transitioned to eating more fish, because I wanted to be "healthier" I started eating more salmon because that's the fish available in German supermarkets, but it's not a taste I ever particularly liked. What's more interesting to observe is that my daughter also doesn't really like it. When you have a 1 year old eating all sorts of fresh fish, but pushing away the salmon, you can't help but wonder, if there is something about food quality that small children taste that we cannot.
weatherlight 4y ago
I call bullshit. Raw Atlantic Salmon Sushi was a "thing" in the US since 1975. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/06/archives/food-natural-wonder-natural-wondercont-from-page-82.html https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/06/archives/food-natural-won... image in the bottom left is "salmon sashimi" here's an image of Michael J Fox eating a piece of salmon sushi on the cover of esquire magazine, circa 1988 https://twitter.com/scbaird/status/1294804653755052032 https://twitter.com/scbaird/status/1294804653755052032
- djur 4y ago
  Both of your examples are from the US, and the actual body of the NYT article doesn't mention salmon sushi at all despite mentioning a half dozen or so other fish (as well as salmon roe), which would be unthinkable today. And the latter example is quite late. The headline claim would be stronger if it had "typically" or "often" in it, but the underlying market data seems sound: > Norway went from selling 2 metric tons of salmon to Japan in 1980 to 28,000 metric tons by 1995.
  - weatherlight 4y ago
    The picture is literally, "Salmon Sushi" (bottom left quadrant.) the article above makes it sound like the Norwegians pushed Atlantic salmon on to the the Japanese, and that the first salmon sushi was "invented" by the Norwegians, Which is patently false.
    - djur 4y ago
      > Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan... What changed? Norway went on a 10-year marketing campaign to sell Atlantic salmon in the East Asian country. And the plan worked. The reason this is relevant? > At the time, the average Japanese person ate 60kg of fish a year (vs. 15kg globally) Americans ate sushi in the '70s and '80s, but far less than the Japanese did. The Norwegians wanted to open up the lucrative Japanese market. That is what this story is about. At no point do they claim that the Norwegians invented salmon sushi.
colordrops 4y ago
I'd be curious to see a data viz of map with a time slider at the bottom, and a food item selecter on the left. For a particular food item, you could see how it spread from it's origin to the cuisines of various regions around the world over time. For instance, noodles from China, or chilis from the Americas.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Apparently (I Read It On The Internet So It Must Be True) you can trace the progress of Scottish traders across the world, by seeing where the local culture starts deep-frying things in batter. Certainly tempura wasn't a thing in Japan until they traded with the West.
Depurator 4y ago
The norwegian salmon farming indsutry is endelssy facinating. Such a young industry has grown from the invention of floating open net pen cages in western norway in the 50s to a 1,4 million tonne export in 2020 worth approximately 7 billion dollars. Due to the technical and biological challenges of food production in the sea as well as the environmental and social pressures to transform the industry, it is now one of the most innovative food production sectors in the world. Digitalization and AI counting of parasites [0], lasers to remove lice [1] and huge offshore installations to minimize coastal impact [2] and crispr sterilized fish [3] are some examples of innovation happening right now in the sector. [0]: https://aquabyte.ai/ https://aquabyte.ai/ [1]: https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en [2]: https://www.salmar.no/havbasert-fiskeoppdrett-en-ny-aera/ https://www.salmar.no/havbasert-fiskeoppdrett-en-ny-aera/ [3]: https://www.hi.no/en/hi/temasider/aquaculture/editing-the-genes-of-farmed-salmon https://www.hi.no/en/hi/temasider/aquaculture/editing-the-ge...
- gadders 4y ago
  It's not great for wild Salmon though, currently.
- vintermann 4y ago
  Yes, they try a lot of stuff. I worked in the library of what is now NTNU Ålesund when I studied, and I remember coming across books about some long abandoned experiments, such as "havbeite", sea grazing. The idea was that they would just release young farmed fish and catch them later. A lot of crazy ecological recklessness like that, but also a lot of creative attempts to do the right things (prevent escapes, minimize antibiotics use and minimize suffering and damage from salmon louse).
xg15 4y ago
From the tweets: > Japan was a natural market for raw fish but Norway had to overcome a few obstacles: So I interpret that as, eating raw fish in general - the main thing about sushi that takes getting used to for westerners - was common in Japan before and was not introduced by the marketing campaign. The campaign was specifically about the stigma around raw salmon, not raw fish in general.
ntech 4y ago
As someone who used to live in Japan I can say that Chilean salmon is much more common than Norwegian while it is also cheaper. The higher price of the Norwegian salmon and its packaging which has the character for fresh used before it ( 生 - as opposed to cured with salt) is made to give the impression that it is superior. I don't have the data for this but I think Sushi sold in stores is mostly Chilean too, unless being explicitly tagged as Atlantic in which case again it would be more expensive.
- vintermann 4y ago
  It is often the same Norwegian salmon companies which own the Chilean farms too, but there they don't have to abide by Norway's environmental standards (and I'm pretty sure they lobby to discourage Chile from adopting similar restrictions)
throwaway2037 4y ago
This myth was disproven by Andong on YouTube. He found a NYTimes article from 1975 about sushi in Japan that included salmon. Watch here: https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4?t=668 https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4?t=668 Edit: Andong also specifically talks about the Nichirei deal.
- yxwvut 4y ago
  Existence and prevalence are not the same thing. Perhaps the title should replace “not eaten” with “not commonly eaten” for maximum accuracy but that doesn’t make it a myth. I’m sure I could find an American restaurant serving squirrel, but I’d still say squirrel is not normally eaten in America.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >I’m sure I could find an American restaurant serving squirrel, but I’d still say squirrel is not normally eaten in America. Right, but if it's casually being shown on nytimes it's reasonable to infer that it's at least somewhat mainstream?
PurpleRamen 4y ago
Interesting twist to make it a horror-show for foodies when they showed their sushi from university.
dang 4y ago
Related: Norway convinced Japan to love salmon sushi (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 - April 2022 (112 comments) How Norway Created Salmon Sushi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 - Sept 2015 (88 comments) (I thought there had been more of these but couldn't find more)

142 points by cwwc 4y ago

This isn’t true. I lived in Japan for several years in the 80s and had salmon sushi a few times. It wasn’t popular, but it existed.

Cyberdog 4y ago
It set off nonsense alarms in my head, though I don't have first-hand experience - but I had some ideas on how it could be disproven. I went to archive.org and found a book about fish preparation from 1977. Searching for "sashimi" (raw fish sushi) shows several results, including an entire section about it. This tweeter is full of shit. https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/280/mode/2up?q=sashimi https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/28...
- groffee 4y ago
  Salmon. Not raw fish. Proper source: https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-norwegian-salmon-industry-created-a-sushi-staple https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n... TL:DR "Traditionally Japanese do not eat salmon sushi and it was invented in the 80's by the Norwegians to to try to sell more of their over abundance of Salmon." See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    This page specifically suggests using salmon for sashimi, and doesn't present the idea as particularly novel: https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/264/mode/2up?q=sashimi https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/26...
    - ipsum2 4y ago
      This is a book about US cuisine?
    - agos 4y ago
      that's not a japanese source, and tells us nothing about the consumption habit of japan before the 90s
  - froh 4y ago
    they didn't eat raw salmon because unfrozen salmon has parasites. aquaculture salmon doesn't have these parasites, likewise deep freezing (as in -20°C for a week or -35°C for a day) makes it safe to eat. so they knew why they didn't eat raw salmon.
- yorwba 4y ago
  It would be more convincing if that book were in Japanese. After all, the claim is about the popularity of raw salmon sushi in Japan, specifically.
- bborud 4y ago
  According to a friend of mine who lives in Japan and fits the stereotype "foodie", reality is somewhere in the middle. Farmed Norwegian salmon was indeed seen as a less desirable option for sushi - and apparently still is. According to him, higher end restaurants usually don't serve salmon sushi. He thought the tweet was a bit sensationalistic and pointed to that Norwegian salmon isn't as popular in sushi as the tweet suggests. But there are other ways to prepare fish besides sushi.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    Well, for a foodie it probably isn't, a sushi enthusiast is going to be into the terroir of the fish, farm raised salmon is kinda hamfisted in that sense, slight step above a California roll. But that doesn't preclude it from assuming a niche in the convenience food sort of sushi.
- permo-w 4y ago
  yeah I had the same feeling. the way it’s written feels like it’s semi-apocryphal to prove some kind of point about marketing

ris58h 4y ago

Reading articles on Twitter? How about no?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
javaunsafe2019 4y ago
How about yes?
- foreverobama 4y ago
  [dead]
bborud 4y ago
When tweets become "articles" the problem isn't really twitter, but suggests the reader may have trouble correctly describing their process of finding things out. When reading this twitter thread I was intrigued so I: - Looked at the export numbers - Asked a couple of friends of mine (one in Japan and one who works in the norwegian salmon industry) - Did a few searches for news coverage about salmon exports to Japan and read a couple of articles while skimming half a dozen more. - Found a master thesis describing "Project Japan" which I've downloaded and will read when I get back from work tonight. "Reading articles on twitter" isn't a thing.
sleepyhead 4y ago
AI generated Twitter articles that have not been fact checked and published by someone who doesn't know anything about the subject. Yay.

samspenc 4y ago

I've always wondered about the history of eating raw meat. My family personally doesn't eat anything raw because of the news reports we've read of people getting sick (or worse) after consuming raw meat, and we make sure to only eat fully cooked meat. My grandparents' generation also seem more familiar with fully cooked meat, I'm wondering whether raw meat came along more recently and where it originated from. At least in the West.

gregoriol 4y ago
Maybe knowledge and techniques to make raw meat/fish safe have improved in the last decades?
- kuhewa 4y ago
  The roots of sushi were in preservation of fish by fermentation. The major food safety improvements recently were probably for industrialized production, where the issues were often creations of modernity anyway. OTOH onboard flash freezing equipment for fisheries haven't hurt.
voytec 4y ago
In Poland, steak tartare (raw ground beef with raw egg yolk, onion, fermented cucumber, pickled mushrooms, salt and pepper) has always been massively popular. In the 90s and 00s, raw yolk was optional due to "popularity" of salmonella. Raw beef meat was somehow still acceptable.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  In Germany, "Tartar" is without egg or veggies, but more spices. Common, just like "Mett" which is raw ground pork with onions, salt and pepper.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    In some areas of Germany, they add a raw egg yolk into the raw pork or beef, and add minced onions, all to be eaten on breakfast bread.

Garlef 4y ago

Here's a YT video from a few months ago that has some additional information: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4

boulos 4y ago

Previous discussion of NPR article covering the 1980s push by Norway to get Japanese people to accept salmon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823

bwv848 4y ago

And yet you should avoid farmed salmon[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_salmonids#Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_salmonids#Issue...

sneak 4y ago
From your link: > The US in their dietary guidelines for 2010 recommends eating 8 ounces per week of a variety of seafood and 12 ounces for lactating mothers, with no upper limits set and no restrictions on eating farmed or wild salmon. ? What am I missing?
- itwasntandy 4y ago
  Keep reading. For example: > A recent study in British Columbia links the spread of parasitic sea lice from river salmon farms to wild pink salmon in the same river
  - Jolter 4y ago
    If we’re talking food safety, I don’t believe those sea lice are any danger to a consumer. Don’t they just invade the gills of the fish?
    - itwasntandy 4y ago
      I wasn’t talking about food safety. The lice from the farmed fish devastate the wild salmon populations, so ecologically they are awful. That to me is a pretty clear reason to avoid farmed salmon.
      - Jolter 4y ago
        I’m sorry, I believe the topic was dietary guidelines. But you’re right, of course, if we should consider the environment as well. I haven’t eaten fish in 8 years, personally, partly because so much of it is fished or farmed in an unsustainable way.

ksec 4y ago

I am pretty sure Project Japan has very little to do with it. Ultimately Salmon Sashimi took off in the East Asia region as well as the Sushi world outside of Japan. And Japan being Japan, took their time to evaluate it due to culture issues.

a_c 4y ago

IMO it isn't much about parasites, it is more a B2B sales tactics turned B2C, and turns out general public likes it. The Project Japan pitch in 1985 was targeting a group of japanese industry experts. It is this group of expert that says the salmon contains parasites hence the customer won't eat it. But in the 90s, after the striking the deal with Nichirei, they find that customer actually like the fatty taste of salmon, parasites wasn't a concern to most. It's like facebook/tiktok pitching their platform to an HN crowd and we obsess over security, privacy, social bubble, vision and stuff, turns out no one give a damn. People like scrolling on the phone aimlessly. That's the fatty salmon

kuhewa 4y ago
This tracks with the historic consumption of other species that are also hosts to zoonotic nematodes raw. It's worth noting that wild salmon do have a very high natural prevalence of Anasakid roundworms.. however these aren't microscopic by any means and a sushi chef could easily screen for them. I think it probably was just about having a consistent, abundant and standardized product rather than highly seasonal and variable wild salmon. You might not be able to beat the right word salmon in the right part of the year if you are are real connoisseur but that isn't amenable to mass consumption. The fat distribution is different as well in a farm raised salmon even if the amount was the same, large visible deposits and it has a very noticable mouth feel and flavour. Long story short I reckon farm raised salmon took off there for the same reason it has in chain restaurants (cooked) in the US.
joatmon-snoo 4y ago
There are still old-school sushi chefs who refuse to eat salmon. And the parasite concern was absolutely a major problem. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/729396914 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/729396914
- sethammons 4y ago
  Which is the same as "there are still old school HN technologists who refuse to use Facebook. And the privacy/security is absolutely a major problem."

foreverobama 4y ago

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franciscop 4y ago

Seems like salmon sushi didn't start at all with Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4

interactivecode 4y ago

My favorite salmon fact is that salmon was really common in the West European rivers. They aren't there anymore due to damming, watermills and other industrialization slowing down the rivers causing them to contain more mud and sand rather than rocks. https://historiek.net/komt-watermolen-deed-nederlandse-zalm-de-das-om/60756/ https://historiek.net/komt-watermolen-deed-nederlandse-zalm-... I've heard from multiple sources that even some old professions had rules about how often they can be force to eat salmon. For example this source talks about how messengers are protected and are only allowed to eat salmon 2-3 times a week. I've seen similar rules in an old dutch servants cook book. http://www.gestolengrootmoeder.nl/wordpress/dienstboden-wilden-niet-meer-dan-drie-keer-per-week-zalm-eten-echt/ http://www.gestolengrootmoeder.nl/wordpress/dienstboden-wild...

ljf 4y ago
So fascinating how quickly things change. Only 150 years ago lobster was the food of the poor in the UK.
- headsoup 4y ago
  And in Australia. And chicken was rich person food
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    And in UK. Back in the sixties, in my fairly well-off bourgeois family, chicken was a rare treat. And even now, not all chicken is cheap; I don't know how much poulet de Bresse costs in France, but it's pretty pricey here.
vintermann 4y ago
I'm pretty sure refrigeration played a major role in making fish less of a poor people's food.

mustafa_pasi 4y ago

I don't get the appeal or raw protein. I tasted it all, raw eggs, raw fish, raw beef and it all just does not taste very good, not as good as the cooked variant.

wkat4242 4y ago
Agreed though smoked salmon is pretty nice imo.
dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
It's quite literally a matter of taste. I enjoy these so my perspective: * raw beef (tartare): the taste of raw beef "makes sense" if you like rare steak. It's a very full umami flavour quite unlike most food. * sushi: raw salmon on nice sticky rice might as well be beef.. cake. It's buttery, breaks apart in your mouth, sweet without actually being sweet. * salted pork: very good also, the salt and fat go together well, i usually eat this with something sweet. * eggs: I don't do raw eggs either. For reference, I've eaten and prepared a lot of different kinds of meat in my life (smoked, dried, grilled, fried etc.) so eating it raw is only a small leap away.
- pishpash 4y ago
  Cooked salmon, like cooked oyster (without condiments) actually stinks. Only the raw version makes sense.
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  * raw pork: Mett is pretty popular in Germany and not a fine dining thing (at all). It is IMO best with extra onion. * raw beef: Filet américain is basically a spicy beef tartare, available in most supermarkets in Belgium and the Netherlands. I can recommend both of these to carnivores :)
- bwv848 4y ago
  Raw grass carp cut into thin transparent slices: chewy, sweet but not overwhelmingly, with lots of fresh flavors, very good for salad but you should not eat it anyway as it can contain liver fluke Raw shrimp: crunchy and fresh, not as sweet as fish Sushi grade raw egg available in my region: the white is smell-less slime with a tiny little bit of taste, the yolk has a mellow sweetness, I can understand why Japanese pair it with rice.

camtarn 4y ago

This Twitter thread is mostly a summary of this article, which provides more detail, albeit maybe in a less easily digestible (ha!) form: https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-invention-9189d9cd78b7 https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-in... The thread is actually wrong on the campaign cost, which might be attributable to the AI-powered summarisation the tweet author boasts about. Norway spent 30m kroner (NOK) on the campaign, which is about $3.75 million instead of the $30m the tweet claims. And the thread misses out the potential return on investment: Norwegian salmon imports to Japan went from 400 million NOK before the campaign, to 1.8 billion NOK in the second half of the 80's.

deafpolygon 4y ago
> which might be attributable to the AI-powered summarisation the tweet author boasts about Just one of the pitfalls of relying on AI and not double-checking the information. I worry for the future. How much might the past be rewritten in the future as a result?
- camtarn 4y ago
  The funny thing was that the author apparently used multiple sources, and has different import figures from the article as a result. But they didn't spot the order-of-magnitude error in the campaign cost.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Bah. Complaining that AI gets summaries wrong is like complaining that a singing dog is out of tune. /s
  - aaron695 4y ago
    [dead]
rjzzleep 4y ago
Very interesting share, thanks. When I transitioned to eating more fish, because I wanted to be "healthier" I started eating more salmon because that's the fish available in German supermarkets, but it's not a taste I ever particularly liked. What's more interesting to observe is that my daughter also doesn't really like it. When you have a 1 year old eating all sorts of fresh fish, but pushing away the salmon, you can't help but wonder, if there is something about food quality that small children taste that we cannot.

weatherlight 4y ago

I call bullshit. Raw Atlantic Salmon Sushi was a "thing" in the US since 1975. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/06/archives/food-natural-wonder-natural-wondercont-from-page-82.html https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/06/archives/food-natural-won... image in the bottom left is "salmon sashimi" here's an image of Michael J Fox eating a piece of salmon sushi on the cover of esquire magazine, circa 1988 https://twitter.com/scbaird/status/1294804653755052032 https://twitter.com/scbaird/status/1294804653755052032

djur 4y ago
Both of your examples are from the US, and the actual body of the NYT article doesn't mention salmon sushi at all despite mentioning a half dozen or so other fish (as well as salmon roe), which would be unthinkable today. And the latter example is quite late. The headline claim would be stronger if it had "typically" or "often" in it, but the underlying market data seems sound: > Norway went from selling 2 metric tons of salmon to Japan in 1980 to 28,000 metric tons by 1995.
- weatherlight 4y ago
  The picture is literally, "Salmon Sushi" (bottom left quadrant.) the article above makes it sound like the Norwegians pushed Atlantic salmon on to the the Japanese, and that the first salmon sushi was "invented" by the Norwegians, Which is patently false.
  - djur 4y ago
    > Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan... What changed? Norway went on a 10-year marketing campaign to sell Atlantic salmon in the East Asian country. And the plan worked. The reason this is relevant? > At the time, the average Japanese person ate 60kg of fish a year (vs. 15kg globally) Americans ate sushi in the '70s and '80s, but far less than the Japanese did. The Norwegians wanted to open up the lucrative Japanese market. That is what this story is about. At no point do they claim that the Norwegians invented salmon sushi.

colordrops 4y ago

I'd be curious to see a data viz of map with a time slider at the bottom, and a food item selecter on the left. For a particular food item, you could see how it spread from it's origin to the cuisines of various regions around the world over time. For instance, noodles from China, or chilis from the Americas.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Apparently (I Read It On The Internet So It Must Be True) you can trace the progress of Scottish traders across the world, by seeing where the local culture starts deep-frying things in batter. Certainly tempura wasn't a thing in Japan until they traded with the West.

Depurator 4y ago

The norwegian salmon farming indsutry is endelssy facinating. Such a young industry has grown from the invention of floating open net pen cages in western norway in the 50s to a 1,4 million tonne export in 2020 worth approximately 7 billion dollars. Due to the technical and biological challenges of food production in the sea as well as the environmental and social pressures to transform the industry, it is now one of the most innovative food production sectors in the world. Digitalization and AI counting of parasites [0], lasers to remove lice [1] and huge offshore installations to minimize coastal impact [2] and crispr sterilized fish [3] are some examples of innovation happening right now in the sector. [0]: https://aquabyte.ai/ https://aquabyte.ai/ [1]: https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en [2]: https://www.salmar.no/havbasert-fiskeoppdrett-en-ny-aera/ https://www.salmar.no/havbasert-fiskeoppdrett-en-ny-aera/ [3]: https://www.hi.no/en/hi/temasider/aquaculture/editing-the-genes-of-farmed-salmon https://www.hi.no/en/hi/temasider/aquaculture/editing-the-ge...

gadders 4y ago
It's not great for wild Salmon though, currently.
vintermann 4y ago
Yes, they try a lot of stuff. I worked in the library of what is now NTNU Ålesund when I studied, and I remember coming across books about some long abandoned experiments, such as "havbeite", sea grazing. The idea was that they would just release young farmed fish and catch them later. A lot of crazy ecological recklessness like that, but also a lot of creative attempts to do the right things (prevent escapes, minimize antibiotics use and minimize suffering and damage from salmon louse).

xg15 4y ago

From the tweets: > Japan was a natural market for raw fish but Norway had to overcome a few obstacles: So I interpret that as, eating raw fish in general - the main thing about sushi that takes getting used to for westerners - was common in Japan before and was not introduced by the marketing campaign. The campaign was specifically about the stigma around raw salmon, not raw fish in general.

ntech 4y ago

As someone who used to live in Japan I can say that Chilean salmon is much more common than Norwegian while it is also cheaper. The higher price of the Norwegian salmon and its packaging which has the character for fresh used before it ( 生 - as opposed to cured with salt) is made to give the impression that it is superior. I don't have the data for this but I think Sushi sold in stores is mostly Chilean too, unless being explicitly tagged as Atlantic in which case again it would be more expensive.

vintermann 4y ago
It is often the same Norwegian salmon companies which own the Chilean farms too, but there they don't have to abide by Norway's environmental standards (and I'm pretty sure they lobby to discourage Chile from adopting similar restrictions)

throwaway2037 4y ago

This myth was disproven by Andong on YouTube. He found a NYTimes article from 1975 about sushi in Japan that included salmon. Watch here: https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4?t=668 https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4?t=668 Edit: Andong also specifically talks about the Nichirei deal.

yxwvut 4y ago
Existence and prevalence are not the same thing. Perhaps the title should replace “not eaten” with “not commonly eaten” for maximum accuracy but that doesn’t make it a myth. I’m sure I could find an American restaurant serving squirrel, but I’d still say squirrel is not normally eaten in America.
- gruez 4y ago
  >I’m sure I could find an American restaurant serving squirrel, but I’d still say squirrel is not normally eaten in America. Right, but if it's casually being shown on nytimes it's reasonable to infer that it's at least somewhat mainstream?

PurpleRamen 4y ago

Interesting twist to make it a horror-show for foodies when they showed their sushi from university.

dang 4y ago

Related: Norway convinced Japan to love salmon sushi (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 - April 2022 (112 comments) How Norway Created Salmon Sushi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 - Sept 2015 (88 comments) (I thought there had been more of these but couldn't find more)