Fish story

Now available in suburban malls and supermarkets alongside other once-unfamiliar foods like bagels, pirogis, and pizza, sushi's path into American tastes is unusual. "Most foreign cuisines started out in immigrant communities. Sushi and Japanese food in general found their way into mainstream society from the top-down, through international travel and business in the 1960s and 1970s," says Theodore Bestor, professor of anthropology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. Bestor's interest in sushi led him to the Tsukiji wholesale fish market. Tsukiji, the largest seafood market in the world, does about $6 billion worth of business each year buying and selling Tokyo's supply of seafood, and much of the business flows through several thousand small, family-owned businesses, some of them many generations old. At Tsukiji, Bestor carried out extended fieldwork on how the market is organized, the evolution of trading practices over the past two centuries, and the market's impact on contemporary food culture. "What interests me is how economic transactions are embedded in social institutions, and how markets are as much about social and cultural trends as they are about 'pure' economics."