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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/ [1]: https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en [2]: https://www.salmar.no/havbasert-fiskeoppdrett-en-ny-aera/ [3]: https://www.hi.no/en/hi/temasider/aquaculture/editing-the-ge...
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).
It's not great for wild Salmon though, currently.
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-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.
> 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?
As per the article Bjorn Eirik Olsen was a key participant. His love of Japan was driven by his interest in Aikido, and he has become one of the relatively few westerners to reach 7th Dan.
He's a very nice guy, and entertaining with stories from those days.
Sigh we need to just rename AI that does this Stupid Intelligence or something.
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.
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
There are still old-school sushi chefs who refuse to eat salmon. And the parasite concern was absolutely a major problem.
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.
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
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.
In Germany, raw pork is consumed. As a non-German, this was an extremely surprising thing to learn as in the Anglosphere it seems that consumption of raw pork is possibly a stronger taboo than consumption of dog or horse meat. I spoke to a German doctor about the issue who explained that all pigs are inspected for parasites at slaughter and it’s relatively rare - but not totally absent - for consumers to get a tapeworm.
It has been around a while in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_tartare gives you some history on raw meat in Europe and America and some jumping off points. Raw liver was the traditional treatment for pernicious anemia.
Quality and freshness of meat is a big concern. You didn't eat raw meat in warm climates before refrigeration, or if you can't source top grade meat uncontaminated by the slaughtering process. And even then you need to inspect for parasites.
Industrial foods with a supply chain have to be extremely careful with raw meat because of the many opportunities for spoilage. If you produce the meat yourself or it is done very locally, you have the opportunity to get it very fresh with many fewer concerns.
The sweet spot for foodbourne illness is industrial scale before rigorous inspections and processes (and refrigeration). That sweet spot fits a lot of people’s grandparents growing up timeframe.
Raw animal products have been consumed forever, what and how are obviously very cultural. During food supply chain industrialization, raw meat became considerably more unsafe and plenty of people were warned.
Now we can get clean food the opportunity to eat raw meat is back and slowly gaining popularity. If you don’t grow up doing it though, there’s a good chance you’ll never be comfortable with it.
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.
Maybe knowledge and techniques to make raw meat/fish safe have improved in the last decades?
Do you also not go to Paris because there was a terrorist act a few years ago?
> 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.
Surely you have access to better sources that say otherwise? You seem to be admitting that you're stuck in your ways and unwilling to try new things because of old or inaccurate news.
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.
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/28...
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-...
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-wild...
I'm pretty sure refrigeration played a major role in making fish less of a poor people's food.
So fascinating how quickly things change. Only 150 years ago lobster was the food of the poor in the UK.
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.
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)
Seems like salmon sushi didn't start at all with Norway:
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
Edit: Andong also specifically talks about the Nichirei deal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a YT video from a few months ago that has some additional information:
Related:
Norway convinced Japan to love salmon sushi (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31148527 - April 2022 (112 comments)
How Norway Created Salmon Sushi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10243823 - Sept 2015 (88 comments)
(I thought there had been more of these but couldn't find more)
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.
And yet you should avoid farmed salmon[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_salmonids#Issue...
Your country's food regulation body should decide whether a given food source is safe for consumption or not. Never understood why people do these angst runs when they have zero informance on these issues and don't even have the means to decide whether the paranoia is warranted.
This depends entirely where (under which rules) they are farmed.
Here in the EU, farmed fish from the Americas comes with the lowest health and safety ratings (and is maybe barely sold because of that), but EU farmed salmon is rated safest, better than wild, especially for babies.
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?
Interesting twist to make it a horror-show for foodies when they showed their sushi from university.
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.
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.
There's nothing to "get". It's personal taste. What's your comment trying to say?
Agree with you but also find animal protein to be pretty gross in general as well (having some experience with meat production). I can see how it's an acquired taste, though. Was eating/cooking dinner (including fish) with some friends a while back and a friend who is from Japan mentioned "I can't believe you're cooking that fish" which always made me laugh a bit.
Well I’ve tried raw protein in whiskey sours(raw egg), sushi of various species(raw fish), and beef tartare and laab(raw beef) and enjoyed it all.
I guess the truth is at an impasse given our opposing anecdata.
Reading articles on Twitter? How about no?
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-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