The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

Trevor Corson escorts the reader behind the sushi bar, through an extensive three-month course at the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles where he spent a semester shadowing its founder and a select group of master chefs and their trainees and experienced first hand what's involved in becoming a naturalist with a knife. As the story of the chefs and trainees unfolds, he describes the different types of organisms that compose sushi, their behavior, biology, evolutionary origins, ecological niches, and nutritional properties. He discusses the seasonal progression of the organisms and explores the techniques by which they're harvested, including what's the best time for harvesting and why. He then provides a history of sushi's origins and evolution in Japan and its transplantation to the United States via Los Angeles, and most compellingly, considers the future of sushi in America, revealing why the best sushi chefs of the future will most likely not be Japanese and male.