sushi

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

journalist

is an index to a nation's worldliness, expressing not only the sophistication of a country's taste, but also an equally sophisticated confidence in the procedural purity of an industry with great potential for corruption and adulteration.

Issenberg argues that sushi is an index to a nation's worldliness, expressing not only the sophistication of a country's taste, but also an equally sophisticated confidence in the procedural purity of an industry with great potential for corruption and adulteration. Combining a hunter-gatherer purity with an international market organized around swift transit and state-of-the-art refrigeration, wealthy consumers and artisan chefs who continually reinvent sushi according to local tastes and ingredients, sushi extends the possibility that we might actually be able to have our globalization and eat it, too.

is representative of a distinct pattern of globalization that defies its usual patterns. Because of its simplicity and its ability to reflect 'individual' styles, it is not susceptible in the same way as other international foods to the dumbing down by corporate monoliths.

Issenberg further argues that sushi, despite its rapid rise as a worldwide fast-food phenomenon, defies the usual patterns of globalization namely, that corporate monoliths take over the production and assembly of raw ingredients, which leads to an inferior and homogenized product being fed to ignorant and uneducated consumers.Modern sushi, he says, hasn't been marketed to us by members of a corporate boardroom, nor have there been powwows determining the market dominance of California rolls. Sushi's evolution and its many different shapes and sizes are the result of individual chefs who have 'mixed flavours across continents.'

Sasha Issenberg

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Sasha Issenberg