Comments on: What you can learn from the million-dollar tuna

By: GawainLavers

GawainLavers — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:25:00 +0000

That’s a great resource. Not a lot of bigeye in sushi restaurants on the West Coast, though, usually just blue or yellow.

They don’t seem to have Walu (escolar) which I’m seeing more and more of and really like. I guess because it’s a little poisonous, but delicious and doesn’t give me any problems in sushi servings…

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:54:00 +0000

So it’s largely status. Basically a veblen good of sorts…

By: JimXavier

JimXavier — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:07:00 +0000

tragedy of the commons,, pure and simple. Chart the graph: scarcity of tuna is directly proportional to prices like these.

By: cegev

cegev — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 07:27:00 +0000

The collapsing stocks are bluefin tuna, not tuna in general. Modernist Cuisine suggests that US Atlantic bigeye tuna is a good alternative to bluefin, referencing seafoodwatch.org. Albacore on the west coast of the US is apparently fine as far as stocks go. See the following, for example:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_alternatives.aspx

By: mccrum

mccrum — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:30:00 +0000

I hear you. I scaled back on cod and a lot of whitefish as much as I can for more renewable sources. Pole caught cod I’m fine with, trawling not so much.

By: GawainLavers

GawainLavers — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:53:00 +0000

It was almost 100lbs lighter than last year’s….

I’m not sure what the point of the article is (the lack of relation between the price and any kind of supply/demand issues was fairly well articulated in all the general news articles I read, e.g. BBC), but I think the answer is probably that based directly on scarcity and renewability, the fish was undervalued.

It totally sucks to do, but I just don’t order tuna anymore at sushi restaurants.