Word: fish
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...Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, is a big fish, weighing up to 1,000 lb (450 kg). It's been around for more than 400 million years, which means it is older than the trees, older than the Himalayas, older than the Atlantic Ocean itself. The species isn't cute. Its expressionless eyes show neither pain nor curiosity, and it doesn't do tricks at aquariums. But it tastes really, really good, and it's on the verge of becoming extinct. Already depleted from overfishing, stocks are down 60% just over the past decade, and the species might be gone...
These weren't tree-hugging Greenpeace activists that Japan was fighting, either, but pragmatic officials trying to preserve an industry with the current life expectancy of Jesse James' next marriage. If you make money from fishing bluefin tuna, and bluefin tuna go extinct, you are out of business. It's really not complicated. The southern bluefin is in even worse shape than its Atlantic counterpart, and scientists still haven't figured out a way to effectively farm a fish that weighs more than an NFL lineman, is entirely carnivorous and takes 30 years to reach its maximum size. Of course...
...small sacrifice. Refusing to eat bluefin tuna isn't one of those empty gestures, like a celebrity wearing a relief-aid ribbon on a $12,000 couture gown. The reason bluefin became the go-to fish for chefs from Tokyo to Tampa is that it tastes so good - and more important, from the point of view of restaurant owners, because it looks so good. What self-respecting sushi restaurant would be caught without a thick ruby slab of tuna under its sneeze guard? How would unimaginative hotel chefs provide their guests with poolside tartare platters if they couldn...
Some of the world's leading seafood virtuosos, like the immensely influential Eric Ripert at New York City's Le Bernardin, won't serve the fish for ethical reasons. Others, like Paul Bartolotta of Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in Las Vegas, one of Le Bernardin's few peers as a seafood temple, find bluefin boring. "We have basically never served tuna here since the day we opened," the chef says. "Aside from the sustainability issues, it's just so overused. You see it everywhere from the Cheesecake Factory to, well, everywhere. The same tuna with the same sweet-spicy Asian...
...already eaten 10,000 times. If a casino restaurant can do sushi like that, why can't everybody? And we diners have to do our part by refusing to order wild bluefin or even making our peace with a farmed tuna, if one ever make its way to the fish market...